Andrea Morales, a documentary photographer, is the winner in photography for the exhibition Roll Down Like Water. The contest was sponsored by the Center for Photographers of Color at the University of Arkansas. Its purpose is to collaborate with artists from diverse backgrounds whose work challenges the monolithic historical narratives within culture and art.
Born in Lima, Peru, Morales grew up in Miami’s Little Havana. She earned a BS degree in journalism from the University of Florida and an MA in visual communication from Ohio University. In 2011, she won the Time magazine’s inaugural student-based photojournalism competition. She had an internship with The New York Times and has worked for such newspapers as El Sentinel, the Concord Monitor, and The Washington Post.
The title for Morales’s exhibit, Roll Down Like Water, is a phrase taken from Martin Luther King’s “Mountaintop” speech the day before he was assassinated in Memphis. The exhibit was inspired by the Memphis-based project MLK50: Justice Through Journalism that focuses on everyday life in Memphis five decades after King’s assassination. Morales is the visuals director and primary photographer for the project. The project’s creator, Wendi Thomas, said, “Thanks to Andrea, the story will be told through the lens of a Latina, a first-gen American, a woman, someone who, at her core, is in solidarity with the people Dr. King was in solidarity with.”
Morales is currently a candidate for an MFA in documentary expression at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture in Oxford, where she is also a producer at the Southern Documentary Project. In her words, her work “attempts to lens the issues of displacement, disruption, and everyday magic”.