About Jill Connelly

Jill Connelly is a documentary photographer and educator based in Los Angeles. She is a contributor to Zuma Press and her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, TIME magazine, Newsweek Japan, People, The Globe and Mail, The San Francisco Chronicle,  the Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe and many others. She has produced images for the Associated Press, Bloomberg and Reuters  and for five years worked as a contract photographer for the Los Angeles Times. Her images are included in the books “Wichita: Coming Home, Going Global” and “4:31– Images of the 1994 Los Angeles Earthquake.” Her work has also been exhibited in numerous group shows at galleries and other venues. Her current project, “Living With the Dead,” explores cemeteries as places for celebrations of life, art, culture and history.

She has enjoyed photographing numerous celebrities, athletes and politicians, including Rosa Parks, Shaquille O’Neal and Bill Clinton, but her favorite stories are those of the ordinary people who have overcome hardships and have interesting stories to tell of their journey along the way.

Jill has done work for NGOs as well. She traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo and photographed the subjects of education, malnutrition, child soldiers, survival and sexual violence for UNICEF. She also went to Greece to photograph the refugee crisis for Allied Aid and photographs for The Red Cross in Los Angeles.

Jill teaches photojournalism at Pierce College where she is the Chair of the Media Arts department and advisor for the campus newspaper and magazine. She has also taught at several other colleges including at Brooks Institute of Photography and with the UCLA Student Media program. She also does photography for colleges including Cal State LA and Pierce College.

She has a master’s degree in Journalism with a photojournalism concentration from Boston University and a bachelor’s in Communication from the State University of New York (SUNY) Plattsburgh, where she minored in Photography. She also completed a social media certificate at Cal State Dominguez Hills and has created social media content for Allied Aid and Pierce College.