Jaime Yaya Barry began working for The New York Times in 2014 as a stringer in Sierra Leone during the Ebola outbreak. In 2016 he became a research assistant for The Times’s West and Central Africa bureau, based in Dakar, Senegal.
Mr. Barry has worked extensively across West Africa, especially during the Ebola outbreak, covering Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. He travelled to the Gambia to cover the disputed 2016 presidential election, which eventually ousted its longtime president, Yahya Jammeh. He has written about migrant issues, social and political issues, and the discovery of one of the world’s largest diamonds, found in Sierra Leone. He has worked with documentary filmmakers from PBS’s “Frontline” and the BBC (“Outbreak”), Vice News (“Evolution of a Plague”), and Channel4 (“The Children Who Beat Ebola”), among others.
Mr. Barry was born in Sierra Leone and spent much of his childhood in several refugee camps in Guinea during the civil war in his home country. He also studied photojournalism at the Autonomous University in Barcelona, Spain.