Check out the latest issue of Baltimore Style magazine to find a profile of 2015 OSI-Baltimore Community Fellow, Meryam Bouadjemi’s most recent endeavor, Close Up Baltimore, a Humans of New York-style photo essay project in which Baltimoreans get to tell their stories. Recently, in an effort to “democratize the platform” the project decided to bring in different photographers, thus allowing for a much broader range of subjects and by extension, a broader range of stories.
As a fellow, Bouadjemi started Make Moves Media which sought to leverage creative content to develop campaigns around issues of returning citizens, a topic she knows well. When she was 10 years old, Bouadjemi’s father was incarcerated, an experience that had a profound effect on her formative years. It also fueled her determination to use creativity to help change attitudes and beliefs about those directly and indirectly affected by the criminal justice system.