Maye-E Wong

In her two decades at the Associated Press (AP), Maye-E Wong was one of the agency’s go-to photographers for a remarkable range of assignments across the world, including more than 35 trips to North Korea. Her career highlights include stories such as Rohingya women fleeing Myanmar, political unrest in Thailand and Hong Kong, the devastation of typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, Bangladesh’s garment factory collapse, and Black Lives Matter protests on the streets of New York.

Her own work has won an Overseas Press Club Hal Boyle Award and was a finalist for the 2018 Ancil Payne Ethics in Journalism Award, as well as a Picture of the Year award from the Reynolds Journalism Institute for her portraits of victims of abuse by Catholic clergy.

She has judged multiple World Press Photo Contests and POY contests and is a Founding Advisor at POY Asia.

More recently, she’s become known as a fierce advocate of visual journalism, an innovator in digital storytelling and, occasionally, an assignment photographer. Maye-E recently traveled across large swaths of the United States documenting life as Americans navigated the uncertainty of both COVID and politics.

Since April 2023, Maye-E has taken on the leadership of Wider Image and Special Projects at Reuters.