The Tim Hetherington Award is a juried award offered to current students or alumni of Tufts University to support a nonfiction storytelling project that seeks to illuminate a humanitarian story that is under-reported.
The Program for Narrative and Documentary Practice began this award to honor Tim Hetherington’s life and work. He photographed the experience of war from the perspective of the individual, mostly in West Africa and the Middle East. Through his photographs, writing and films, Hetherington offered new ways to look at and think about human suffering. Hetherington published Liberia Bit by Bit: Long Story Retold, documenting the civil war in Liberia, and Infidel, a book of his photographs from Restrepo, the film he co-directed with Sebastian Junger about a platoon of soldiers in Afghanistan. Restrepo was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award in 2011 for Best Documentary Feature. Hetherington was a member of PNDP’s Advisory Board. He was killed in 2011 covering the war in Misrata, Libya.
The first recipient of this Award was Elizabeth Herman (A10), an alumna of the EPIIC and Exposure programs, to continue her work on “A Woman’s War” in Bosnia-Herzegovina.