Photo Courtesy:
Another Kenyan woman made Kenyans proud just weeks after Angella Okutoyi made us proud on the big stage when she won the junior championship making her the first Kenyan ever to win a Wimbledon title.
The list of Kenyan women making us proud as a country doesn’t seem to end soon as it is becoming longer each day, the latest addition to the list is Polly Irungu.
Announcing her appointment for the big job in an Instagram post, she wrote “New chapter, I’m excited to announce that I’m the first official photo editor for the office of the vice president to the Biden-Harris administration. Honored and grateful is an understatement.”
Polly is also the founder of the black women photographers, a global community that has a directory of over one thousand black women photographers who can get hired from their website.
Polly was born in Nairobi where she lived with her parents for a few years before moving to the United States of America where she has lived in different states.
Policy attended the University of Oregon between 2012 and 2017 and holds a bachelor of arts degree in journalism.
Polly, like other black photographers, struggled to get a job and only got opportunities during black social uprisings or black history month. While expressing her dissatisfaction with the photography industry in the US, Polly said “I didn’t see myself in this industry.
I didn’t see other people who look like me being celebrated in the same way as their counterparts. And when it comes down to it, I’m a photographer all 12 months of the year, not just one. So why am I not being hired for other opportunities?”
Polly decided to seek like-minded black people in the industry and started the black women photographers a platform that enables them to get jobs. Before this prestigious appointment, Sh worked with other big companies like Twitter and was among the 100 hosts for the twitter spaces spark program.
She is also among the 100 United States-based creators accepted into Linkedin’s first class of creators, she also worked with WeTransfer as an assistant photo editor for three months and was a digital editor at the New York Public Radio. Polly is also a teacher at the international center of photography.
Her work has also been published in top magazines like the New York Times, BBC News, The Washington Post, CNN, and BuzzFeed among others.
