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Evgenia Arbugaeva

Evgenia Arbugaeva was born in the small town of Tiksi, located on the shore of the Laptev Sea in Russia. In her photographic work, she often looks into her Arctic homeland, discovering and capturing the remote worlds and people who inhabit them. A contributing photographer to National Geographic magazine, she first covered a story on mammoth hunters—native people of Yakutia who excavate mammoth tusks from the thawing permafrost of the New Siberian Islands—that appeared in the April 2013 issue. Recently, for an October 2017 article, Evgenia migrated with nomadic reindeer herders on the Yamal Peninsula in the Russian Arctic to capture the impact of growing development of natural gas industry on the traditional lifestyle of Nenet indigenous people.

A graduate of New York's International Center of Photography’s Documentary Photography and Photojournalism program, she is a recipient of the ICP Infinity Award as well as the Leica Oskar Barnack Award. Arbugaeva's work has also appeared in The New Yorker and Le Monde, among other publications, and has been exhibited in the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, the Photographers’ Gallery in London, and The Rencontres d’Arles in Provence, France. Evgenia looks forward to sharing her photographic knowledge and special love for this region with travelers on this expedition.