Glenna Gordon

In 2019, Gordon won the Aftermath Grant for her proposed project American Women. This project is an expansion of American Women of the Far Right. The project will cover women who live in the same areas but who instead work for social justice.

Gordon's Diagram of the Heart captures female novelists living in Kano, a city in Northern Nigeria. The novelists write in the genre of Littattafan Soyayya, which roughly translates to love literature. Published in 2016 Diagram of the Heart was awarded photo book of the year by The New York Times Magazine, Pictures of the Year International and PDN (Photo District News). The book was also featured in Moving Walls 23: Journeys and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts.

In 2014, Gordon was commissioned by The New York Times to take photographs for an article on ISIS hostages by Rukmini Callimachi. The article "The Horror Before the Beheadings" focused on the experiences of people held hostage by ISIS. The photographs were also featured in Callimachi's articles "Paying Ransoms, Europe Bankrolls Qaeda Terror". In this series, Gordon photographed objects the freed hostages held onto during and after their captivity. The objects reveal pieces of individual hostage's stories unknown to the public.

In 2014, the jihadist terrorist organization, Boko Haram kidnapped 276 girls from their boarding school in Chibok in northeast Nigeria. Although there was media coverage about the incident, little mentioned the kidnapped girls themselves. Gordon photographed some of their belongings sent to her by family members. The photographs were published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Time. The work was given the 2015 World Press Award.

Published in 2012, Nigeria Ever After is a collection of photographs from Nigerian weddings. The collection explores the style and cost of marriage in the country.

Liberia: Traces of America's Ghosts is an ongoing project to documenting the after effects of Liberia's civil war. Gordon has been working in Liberia as a photojournalist since 2009.

In 2006, Gordon earned a master's degree in print journalism from the Columbia University School of Journalism. She then made her first trip to Africa where she photographed images of the developing world. Her work has been shown in museums in New York City, Washington D.C., Nigeria, and London. She lectures at the New School in New York City in the graduate program for international affairs.