Annika Hammerschlag is a French and English speaking freelance photojournalist, videographer and reporter who’s covered West Africa from Dakar, Senegal since 2019. She works primarily as a West Africa radio and video stringer for VOA and as a videographer for Al Jazeera English. Her work has also been published in The New York Times, The Economist, The BBC, Bloomberg and The Guardian, among others. She is most interested in environmental stories and has covered a variety of topics while on deployment throughout the region, including corruption and coastal erosion in Liberia, the jihadist insurgency in Mali and overfishing in Cape Verde. 

Annika received her master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School and her bachelor’s from UCLA. She’s a former staff reporter and photojournalist for the Naples Daily News/USA Today Network and a former photojournalist for The Daily Bruin. She’s a 2016 Overseas Press Club Scholar awardee.