Photographer of the Year, Asia

Ezra Acayan is a photojournalist based in the Philippines with a decade of experience covering politics, climate change, and social injustice. Since 2019, he has regularly worked on assignment for Getty Images. In 2017, together with a team of Reuters journalists, he was awarded a special merit at the Human Rights Press Awards for multimedia reporting on the Philippines' drug war. In 2018, he received grants from both the Ian Parry Scholarship and the Lucie Foundation, as well as being named Young Photographer of the Year at the Istanbul Photo Awards. In 2019, he received a World Press Photo Award in the Spot News category. In 2021, he was awarded a World Press Photo Award in the Nature Stories category for his work on Taal volcano's eruption, and — together with a team of Getty Images photojournalists covering the global outbreak of COVID-19 — was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography for his work. In the same year he was also named Photographer of the Year at the inaugural Pictures of the Year Asia, and received several more awards from Picture of the Year International (POYi), National Press Photographers Association, and the Society of Publishers Asia. He has done work for various outfits such as Getty Images, Reuters, European Pressphoto Agency, and Agence France-Presse; and institutions such as the World Bank, Agence Française de Développement, African Development Bank, and French Red Cross, among others.

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