B.A., The University of Colorado at Boulder, 2006
M.A., American University, Washington, D.C., 2008
Federica Valabrega was born in Rome, Italy, in 1983. She received her Bachelor of Science in Integrative Physiology from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2006 and her Master of Arts from American University in Washington, D.C. in 2008. Valabrega lived in New York City from 2010 until 2020, when she moved back to Rome, Italy. Her photographs have been published in: The New York Times Magazine, TIME Magazine, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, LA Times, NPR.org, Vanity Fair Italy, Vogue Italy, M Le Magazine du Monde, La Repubblica, L’Espresso, La Stampa, and Il Corriere della Sera.
Valabrega's photography and personal projects both focus on people. Her fascination with humans – particularly those who find self-expression difficult in a world full of societal taboos – is rooted in her own unique and challenging experience as an Italian immigrant in a foreign country. Valabrega is interested in getting as close as possible to her subjects’ lives. She applies a narrative layer to the visual storytelling, portraying both the intrinsic beauty and the hidden controversies of her subjects in all of their complexity.
In 2013, she published the photobook Daughters of the King, a documentary project on the role of women within the Orthodox Jewish communities in New York, Israel, Morocco, Tunisia, and Paris. She exhibited this photo essay worldwide until 2017. She now works in Rome, Italy, as an assignment photojournalist for The Washington Post, and she does advertising campaigns for Ferrovie dello Stato (FS) (the Italian Railway System). She started teaching Digital Photography at John Cabot University in July 2022.
