Mark Leong Awarded the
2024 Michel du Cille Fellowship
The National Press Photographers Foundation (NPPF) is proud to announce that photographer Mark Leong has been awarded the 2024 Michel du Cille Fellowship. Leong will receive $15,000 in support of his project, Coming of Age: China’s Post-90s Generation.
This year saw a record number of applications for the fellowship, underscoring both the growing need for support in visual journalism and the exceptional quality of work being produced across the field.
Named in honor of the late Michel du Cille—the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist and Washington Post staff photographer and editor—the fellowship recognizes visual journalists whose work reflects du Cille’s commitment to compassionate, human-centered storytelling.
Leong’s project continues his decades-long exploration of youth culture in China, a journey he began in the 1990s as a personal investigation into identity, migration, and belonging. What started as a means of imagining who he might have become had his family not emigrated from Guangdong to California more than a century ago has evolved into an in-depth, generational chronicle of a rapidly transforming nation. The next chapter of this work will revisit young adults from China’s “post-90s” generation, whom Leong first met in 2018, capturing how they now choose to represent and narrate their own lives.
Upon learning he had been selected, Leong said, “It is a big honor and a lot to live up to. I am excited to continue engaging with this cohort, to see how our different viewpoints interact. As a photographer from a time when narratives usually came from a single outsider perspective, I don’t think it’s enough to do it on your own anymore. Photography can be a dynamic conversation, listening to what the people we are documenting have to say about themselves.”
Juror Dudley M. Brooks said, “The project falls right into Michel’s philosophy of what he demanded of his photographers: great pictures and great storytelling. Get in and tell the story effectively.”
A Chinese American photographer born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Leong graduated from Harvard University in 1988. He first traveled to China as a Gardner Fellow and, in 1992, completed a residency at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, supported by the Lila Wallace Foundation. He made Beijing his long-term base in 1997 and published China Obscura in 2004. Leong returned to the Bay Area in 2017, where he continues to live and work.
Leong is a member of Redux Pictures and a contributing photographer for National Geographic. His work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Fortune, and Smithsonian, among others. His accolades include support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Overseas Press Club, Fifty Crows, the Open Society Foundations (2005 and 2014), and, most recently, CENTER’s Fiscal Sponsorship in 2024.
The Michel du Cille Fellowship serves as a tribute to the exemplary career of its namesake, who tragically lost his life while covering the Ebola crisis in Liberia. Du Cille’s legacy lives on through the fellowship, honoring those who embody his passion for compassionate storytelling through visual journalism. The 2024 Michel du Cille Fellowship jury consisted of Dudley M. Brooks, a retired photographer and former Deputy Director of Photography for The Washington Post; Carol Guzy, an independent photographer; and Nikki Kahn, Visuals Editor for Sierra Magazine.
The NPPF Officers and Board of Directors extend their warmest congratulations to Mark Leong on this well-deserved honor and look forward to the powerful work that will emerge with the support of the Michel du Cille Fellowship.
MARK LEONG