Stacy Kranitz M.F.A. ’14 Awarded Pulitzer Prize for Public Service

Kranitz contributes powerful images to Life of the Mother, ProPublica’s award-winning reporting on abortion laws and maternal care

Department of Art alumna Stacy Kranitz, M.F.A. ’14, is one of the contributors to Life of the Mother, the Pulitzer Prize-winning public service series by independent nonprofit newsroom ProPublica. The prestigious award, announced on May 6, recognizes the project’s urgent reporting on pregnant women who died after being denied timely medical care under restrictive state abortion laws. Awarded for journalism that serves the public good, the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service honors work that exposes injustice, informs the public and drives meaningful social awareness or reform.

“For this project, we imagined a new kind of storytelling that had not previously existed at ProPublica – a visuals-first investigative photographic essay that holds people in positions of power to account,” said Kranitz. “It was a remarkable opportunity to imagine how photography could operate as both investigative journalism and art. I am truly grateful that the Pulitzer board honored our work on life in post-Roe America with an award for Public Service.” 

Kranitz’s contribution to the series was as the photographer behind the photo essay The Year After a Denied Abortion, a powerful and intimate visual exploration of one woman’s experience following the denial of abortion care. Her work served as a key storytelling component of the investigation, providing emotional depth and visibility to the human impact of policy decisions. She shares the Pulitzer honor with ProPublica journalists Kavitha Surana, Lizzie Presser and Cassandra Jaramillo.

Working within the documentary landscape, Kranitz creates images that embrace the inherent tensions of photographic representation. Her photographs do not claim objective truth, yet instead expose and reclaim the ambiguity, exoticism and emotional instability often embedded in the medium, capturing the human experience in all its contradictions.

Born in Kentucky and now based in eastern Tennessee’s Appalachian Mountains, Kranitz has received widespread recognition for her work, including a 2020 Guggenheim. She has also had solo exhibitions of her photographs presented at the Rencontres d’Arles in Arles, France, the Cortona on the Move in Cortona, Italy and the Tennessee Triennial in Chattanooga, TN. Her photographs are in several public collections, including the Harvard Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Art, Houston and Duke University, Archive of Documentary Arts. She has also contributed to publications including The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic and Mother Jones.

To learn more about Stacy Kranitz’s work, visit stacykranitz.com. To read the Life of the Mother series, visit propublica.org.