Britta Radike lives and works as a photographer in Berlin. After completing a project year in New Zealand and her studies in geography, ethnology, and psychology at Berlin’s Humboldt University (1999-2000), she also studied photography at the technical University of Dortmund, Germany. Her prize-winning graduation project – a stunning photo book with the ironic title A Place to Call Home – offered a distressing but humane, critical view of “Ogaden – Somali Refugees at the Horn of Africa.” Backed by FORWARD – Germany, e.V. that opposes FGM and racism (and has been renamed FORWARD for Women), Britta had visited Somalia as part of an anti-FGM campaign called “Bildung statt Beschneidung,” or education, not excision, and subsidized school fees for girls whose parents pledged to refrain from genital mutilation. Teaming up with Tobe Levin, Britta published a peer-reviewed article, “A Place to Call Home. Images and Interviews with Refugees from Ogaden,” in TRANSITION. An International Review, an official publication of the W.E.B. Dubois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University (Vol 11. 2008. Pp. 78-111). She also exhibited her prize-winning photographs in Frankfurt for Zero Tolerance to FGM Day on 6 February 2008, and pictures later shot in Kenya and Hamburg enhance the UnCUT/VOICES book Kiminta (2015). Britta’s preparation for accolades continued in 2007 at the TPW Master Class with Stanley Green and Kadir von Lohuizen in Italy. A scholarship from the Cultural Foundation of the VG Bild-Kunst enabled her to produce in 2009, 15 years after the genocide, a longer documentary on Rwanda’s orphaned children. Britta travels widely.  Her photos document journeys, for instance, to Beirut, Jordan, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Syria, Thailand, Afghanistan, Korea, and Mexico.

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Time and again, Britta’s work has won awards, including the Focus Award (2005), the Lumix Digital Photo Award (2006), UNICEF Nominee for Picture of the Year 2008 and nominee for the CNN Journalist Award (2010). Continuous exhibitions bring her work to a wide audience. These include the Frankfurt Book Fair (2006), the Goethe Institute of Dresden (2008), the ISA conference in NY (2009), in Hamburg, Kabul, and Lagos (2010). A member of the photography club, freelens e.V., Britta has documented fundraisers held 2006-2011 with the Malian Ambassador to Germany, the late Fatoumata Siré Diakité (1949-2016) – see www.uncutvoices.wordpress.com, search Fatoumata – and a series of academic gatherings exploring FGM at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, including “Elephants in the Room. Hurdles – and Hope – for Ending FGM,” a workshop sponsored by UnCUT/VOICES Press and the International Gender Studies Center led by Dr. Maria Jaschok (IGS at LMH, University of Oxford) in November 2017; “Female Genital Mutilation: Myths, Memoir, Media, Money – and Sex,” an International Workshop also under the aegis of UnCUT/VOICES Press and IGS at LMH, 9 March 2018 and again on 8 June 2018, “Most Pressing Issues to End FGM by 2030.” Britta has been the official photographer at FORWARD for Women fund-raising events for nearly two decades, the most recent held in Schlosshotel Kronberg on 16 February 2018. Finally, an impressive tri-lingual – Portuguese, German, and English – coffee table book provided much of this biographical information, so here’s a thank you to Ronald Grätz, editor, and Britta Radike, photographer, Minhasp -- Minhao São Paulo (edition esefeld & traub, 2013).