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Sahat Zia Hero

Founding Editor, Photographer and Mentor

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Sahat is a documentary photographer, writer and human rights activist and consultant. He is the founder of Rohingyatographer Magazine. Sahat was born in 1994 in Maungdaw Township, Arakan, Myanmar. In 2012, he was studying Physics at Sittwe University but due to the systematic discrimination against the Rohingya, he was excluded from attending his second year in university. In August 2017, he was forced to flee with his family to Bangladesh where he currently lives in the refugee camps. After his arrival, he worked as a team leader for the Danish Refugee Council. He currently divides his time between freelance photography work for various NGOs and international media outlets, managing the magazine project and working at the Rohingya Cultural Memory Centre.

 

His photographs have been published by The Guardian, NBC, Aljazeera, Visual Rebellion Myanmar, The Territorial News, UNHCR, Danish Refugee Council, Norwegian Refugee Council and Amnesty International. He is a regular contributing photographer to the Rohingya Photo Competition. His photographs have been exhibited at the Oxford Human Rights Festival in 2021, the Liberation War Museum in Dhaka, the Cox’s Bazar Cultural Centre and the Head On Photo Festival in Sydney in 2022. 

 

Sahat has written work published in Forced Migration Review, Lacuna Magazine and Migrant Voice. He also writes poetry in Burmese, Rohingya and English. In 2020, his poems were published in Rohingya Dreams, an anthology of Rohingya poets published by the Danish Refugee Council with support from the European Union. 

 

In March 2021, he fell victim to the devastating fires that left 50,000 Rohingya homeless in the refugee camp.“My family managed to escape and when the fire was over, I returned to find nothing but ashes where my home used to be. Nothing. My laptop and pen drives where gone. It was the second time I lost everything since I fled my home in Myanmar back in 2017. Nevertheless, I was able to document the unfolding of the fire event with the camera on my phone.” From this experience, he published his first photobook titled Rohingyatography in 2021. The same year he was nominated for the UNICEF Photographer of the Year Award. 

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