Biographical Profile |
<html>Paola Gianturco, an award-winning author and photographer with a longstanding commitment to women’s issues, has documented women’s lives in sixty-two countries with six published books. She has lectured about women’s issues in the US, Canada, France, the United Arab Emirates, and Spain. Speaking engagements include an address at UNESCO International Headquarters in Paris on International Women’s Day in 2008 (where her photographs were exhibited in 2009 and 2011) and a TED TALK in Dubai in 2014. Gianturco had a successful career in the advertising industry, including as a principal at Hall & Levine, the first women-owned advertising agency in the United States. Gianturco has also co-developed and taught executive institutes on women and leadership at Stanford University, served on the board of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), and is a current member of the International Women’s Forum. In 2013, Gianturco was named one of “Forty Women to Watch over Forty,” and in 2014, she was named one of “Twenty-one Leaders for the Twenty-first Century” by Women’s eNews. In 2017 the YWCA inducted her into the Marin Women’s Hall of Fame.
Gianturco’s published works imaginatively combine images and text. Her sixth book, Wonder Girls: Changing Our World<b> </b>was created with her eleven-year-old granddaughter co-author, Alex Sangster, and released in October 2017. It is the first book to document the work of groups of activist girls around the world. The fifteen groups featured include girls from age ten to eighteen who are tackling diverse issues in thirteen countries. The book has won literary awards in categories as diverse as Women’s Studies, Multicultural Nonfiction, and, most recently, a Gold in the Social Justice category of the Nautilus Book Awards.
Her fifth book, Grandmother Power: A Global Phenomenon, documents a new, unheralded international women’s movement. Grandmother Power features 120 activist grandmothers in grandmother groups across five continents who are fighting courageously and effectively--against poverty, disease, illiteracy, and human rights abuse--to create a better world for grandchildren everywhere. Grandmother Power has won the 2013 Living Now Book Award’s Gold Medal--Social Action category, Foreword Reviews’ 2012 Book of the Year Gold Award--Women’s Studies category, the 2013 About.com Readers’ Choice Award for Favorite Grandparenting Book, and the 2013 International Book Award for Multicultural Nonfiction.
Women Who Light the Dark was released in 2007. It features women in fifteen countries who are helping each other with the intractable problems that make life dark for families everywhere.
Gianturco’s third book, ¡Viva Colores! A Salute to the Indomitable People of Guatemala was published in September 2006. Its bi-lingual, English/Spanish text was written by David Hill.
Her second book, Celebrating Women (2004) features festivals in fifteen countries that celebrate women’s accomplishments, attributes, roles, rites of passage, and spiritual lives. The first exhibit ever curated by the International Museum of Women (San Francisco) was Celebrating Women. A travelling exhibit was mounted by the Field Museum in Chicago, where 195,000 visitors saw it during seven months in 2008. UNESCO exhibited Celebrating Women in March 2009 at its world headquarters in Paris. In 2010 and 2011, the show travelled to six US venues.
Gianturco conceived and, collaborating with Toby Tuttle, was co-author/photographer of In Her Hands: Craftswomen Changing the World, (hardcover, 2000; paperback, 2004). This book features women artisans in twelve countries, all sending their children to school with the money they earn from selling their handicrafts. Photographs from this book have been exhibited at the United Nations in New York; the United States Senate; the Smithsonian Museum Folklife Festival in Washington DC, and Chicago’s Field Museum.
Gianturco has been a guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show, NPR, and CNN. Her photographs have been published by Harpers Bazaar (Australia), Marie Claire (US, Taiwanese, and Greek editions), the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner, the Denver Post, the Chicago Tribune, and on many Internet sites, podcasts, and blogs.</html>
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