Satomi Kato: Visual Storyteller

"I fell in love with photography," says Kato

When Satomi Kato enrolled in SOC's MFA Film and Video program, she was already an experienced television co-anchor and radio reporter in her native Japan. But four years of producing news programs had led to a new goal: to become a documentary producer.

No sooner did Kato begin her classes at SOC, however, when a course opened her eyes to still another kind of visual storytelling. “I fell in love with photography,” says Kato, who changed the focus of her graduate work to photojournalism.

To pursue her new passion—and work on her master’s thesis--Kato traveled in the summer of 2005 to Peshawar, a remote part of Pakistan. Her collection of photographs from the trip, "Forgotten Afghan Refugee Children in Pakistan," was exhibited the next year at the United Nations Headquarters in New York and in 2008 at FotoWeek in DC, alongside the work of renowned photographer Annie Leibowitz.

In the meantime, Kato was selected as one of 12 college photographers to participate in the Associated Press photography workshop, taught by Pulitzer-Prize winning photographers.

She sees her time as an SOC student as a springboard for her professional work. “SOC offers classes with professionally experienced professors who advised me and guided me on the right track,” she says.

Currently, Kato is the official photographer for the Embassy of Japan in Washington, DC and a freelance photographer for Kyodo News, the Mainichi Newspapers in Washington, DC, and Asahi Shimbun in New York.