Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Patrick Farrell has been a professional photojournalist for more than 30 years. His work has taken him to Turkey, Haiti, Cuba and throughout LatinAmerica and the Caribbean. In 2009, Farrell’s haunting images from a brutal hurricane season in Haiti won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography. His photographs from Haiti also have been recognized with first place prizes from Pictures of the Year International and the Overseas Press Club, among other awards. Along with a team from WLRN, Farrell was honored with the 2016 Edward R. Murrow First Place Award for a multi-media project on immigration.
From 1987 to 2019, Farrell was a staff photographer at the Miami Herald, where he was part of the newspaper’s staff that won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of Hurricane Andrew. He has photographed Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Cuba in 2012, the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, the 1999 earthquake in Turkey, the 1989 Miami riots, and social justice issues throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. He was the National Press Photographers Association’s Region 6 Newspaper Photographer of the Year in 1992 and 1993, and he has twice been named Southern Photographer of the Year at the Southern Short Course, the country’s longest-running photojournalism seminar.
Farrell was a 2010 Ochberg Fellow at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. In 2017-2018, Farrell was a Distinguished Executive-in-Residence for Photojournalism at Emerson College’s School of Communication, where his photos were part of “Uncommon Project,” a large-scale projection mapping showcase on the façade of a building overlooking Boston Common.
Farrell is currently a freelance photographer and part-time faculty for the School of Communication at the University of Miami, his alma mater. He is curator of The Sunday Long Read’s “Sunday Still” feature, which showcases the most impactful photograph of the week. Farrell has worked with Doctors Without Borders, Visit Florida, Knight Foundation, MARCA Miami, PNC Bank and Leon Medical Centers, among other clients. A native of Miami, he grew up in a family of 12 children. He’s married to former Miami Herald journalist Jodi Farrell and they have two daughters.