Biography

Valerie Plesch is an independent photojournalist, documentary photographer and writer based in Washington, D.C. where she covers politics, the White House, Capitol Hill, immigration, refugee resettlement, and other issues for editorial and feature assignments.

Her long-term photo documentary work explores the intersection of the aftermath of wars, memory, identity, and trauma. 

Since early 2021, she's been documenting the growing Afghan community in the Washington, DC area and the arrival of asylum seekers and refugees who fled Afghanistan in recent months and years. As a Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting grantee working on Afghan refugee resettlement stories, she explored and chronicled challenges faced by refugees who evacuated to the United States during and after the Taliban takeover. 

Leading up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, she spent months photographing inside the Vietnamese American community in northern Virginia where she grew up for a feature story about how the pain and trauma from the Vietnam War played a significant role in Vietnamese American voters’ choice for president. 

From 2014-2019, she was based in Pristina, Kosovo where she focused on how the world's second newest nation confronted its wartime past. She also covered breaking news, human rights issues, religion, sports, politics, and culture. Some of her most memorable reporting experiences from the Balkans include shadowing Kosovo's first female president for an in-depth profile, shooting a video about Kosovo's first Olympic gold medalist, photographing Kosovo's first major music festival headlined by global pop singer Dua Lipa, and covering the refugee crisis on the Greek-North Macedonian border. She also spent several months in 2018 and 2019 photographing and interviewing rape survivors from the war as part of a long-term photo documentary project on the legacy of sexual violence. In 2014 she reported from Kabul, Afghanistan during the historic presidential election and produced other feature stories, including one about the future of the Afghan National Army and a long-form story about an ancient archaeological site in Logar province that is home to some of Central Asia’s oldest Buddhist artifacts that also happens to be buried under one of the largest copper mines in the world.

Before pursuing her passion for visual storytelling, Valerie held a decade-long career in the international development field implementing USAID-funded projects. Her work took her to post-conflict and post-disaster countries including Afghanistan, where she lived for one year, Pakistan, Indonesia, Haiti, Thailand and Vietnam.