(Presentation by Jules Shell, Foundation Rwanda) Jules Shell will speak about her organization, Foundation Rwanda, and its impact on the ground in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide. She will also be providing a timeline of events that led up to the genocide and what is currently happening in Rwanda. Jules is co-founder and the executive director of Foundation Rwanda. The organization’s mission is to provide funding for the secondary school education of children born from rape during the 1994 genocide, link their mothers to existing psychological and medical support services and create awareness about the consequences of genocide and sexual violence through photography and new media. Between April and June of 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the space of 100 days. The genocide was sparked by the death of the Rwandan president Juvenal Habarimana, a Hutu, when his plane was shot down above Kigali airport on April 6, 1994. Most of the dead were Tutsis and those who perpetrated the violence were Hutus. Thousands more were raped, tortured and beaten. The international community failed to stop the crimes. Shell shot Foundation Rwanda’s short film “Intended Consequences”, which was recently nominated for an Emmy.

Artist’s Lecture: Jonathan Torgovnik

Jonathan Torgovnik will present a lecture about his time in Rwanda and the unique experiences he had while interacting with the victims in his photographs. Torgovnik was born in 1969 in Israel and received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. His photographs have been widely exhibited and published in numerous international publications, including Newsweek, Aperture, GEO, Sunday Times Magazine, and Stern, among others. He has been a contract photographer for Newsweek magazine since 2005, and is on the faculty of the International Center of Photography School in New York. In 2007, Torgovnik won the National Portrait Gallery’s Photographic Portrait Prize for an image from Intended Consequences. Torgovnik’s award-winning photographs have been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the US and Europe and are in the permanent collections of museums such as The Museums of Fine Arts, Houston and the Bibliotheque National De France in Paris. He is the author of Bollywood Dreams (Phaidon Press), an exploration of the motion picture industry and its culture in India. He is also co-founder of Foundation Rwanda, a non-profit organization that supports secondary school education for children born of rape in Rwanda.

Tags: Heather McClintock, Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children born of Rape, Jonathan Torgovnik, Jules Shell, The Halsey Institute of Contempory Art, The Innocents: Casualties of the Civil War in Northern Uganda