Akbari and Marino named Jim Marshall Fellows: ‘Capturing the world in a way words often cannot’

Denis Akbari and Walter David Marino

The competitive Jim Marshall Fellowships have been awarded to two second-year students, Denis Akbari and Walter David Marino.

The $6,000 prize, named after renowned photographer Jim Marshall, supports a new generation of photojournalists by helping to reduce the debt burden they carry into their professional lives. The funding is provided by former reporter and legendary ad-man Jeff Goodby and San Francisco-based photographer and Marshall’s long-time assistant and heir Amelia Davis.

“Like Jim Marshall, a child of immigrants who crossed documentary photography boundaries to create iconic music photos (over 500 record covers) and visually recording the changing times, Denis and Walter are each deeply committed to capturing the world in a way words often cannot,” said Ken Light, the Reva and David Logan Professor of Photojournalism at UC Berkeley Journalism.

Walter Marino grew up in National City and Spring Valley, California. His mother is a daughter of Mexican immigrants and his father immigrated from Costa Rica at five-years-old.

Walter says the themes and style of his photography and documentary films are deeply influenced by his Latino culture. He often explores themes like pride and machismo, for example, as well as topics that touch on mental health. His current project is a film about his father’s use of psilocybin to help recover from divorce, addiction and incarceration.

Walter Marino in Afghanistan.

Marino’s journalism career started in the Marine Corps, when he was a combat correspondent from 2008 to 2015. He deployed to Afghanistan in 2009 and was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal for producing over 30 articles with supporting photographs on the U.S. military’s Operation Enduring Freedom.

Following his military service and during his undergraduate studies, he said his view of documentary photography changed. He learned that photography didn’t have to be in a straight news fashion or “obvious or clean or smooth.” He learned that photography and filmmaking could be art, emotion and as creative as he wanted.

In addition to the thesis film about his father, Marino is producing a photo thesis on masculinity and fatherhood within Latino families.

Denis Akbari is an Iranian-Italian multimedia journalist and photojournalist dedicated to capturing the human experience through the lens of social justice. With a background in information technology, print and video journalism, she focuses on marginalized communities, aiming to amplify voices often overlooked in mainstream narratives.

“Getting the Jim Marshall Fellowship means a lot for me and I feel very honored to have my work recognized at an early stage of my photojournalism career,” she said. “I literally started a year and a half ago with Ken Light’s Intro to Photography class and it feels very rewarding that I picked up a camera, learned and improved so much in such a short time.”

Denis Akbari

Akbari is currently working on a multimedia thesis project on collaborative courts in California and is producing a photo thesis on the human stories behind the current immigration crisis.

Akbari recently started as a Production News Intern at ABC7 News in San Francisco and has been working with San Quentin News since August 2024. She majored in Computer Information Systems with a minor in Journalism at Cal State Los Angeles where she worked for the University Times as digital editor and reporter.

Ten Years In

Light said all of the Jim Marshall Fellows — ten and counting — have been “remarkable” and “talented” as well as successful in publishing in major outlets or having their work acquired by museums and collectors.

Past fellows include George Alfaro and April Martin (‘24), Kathryn Styer Martínez (‘23) and Katie Rodriguez (‘23), who was included in The 30: New and Emerging Photographers to Watch list and in 2019 and one of her photographs was selected for TIME Magazine’s Best Photojournalism of the Year; Mathew Miranda (’22), Clara Shuku Mokri (’21), Wesaam Al-Badry (’20), Drew Costley (’19), Samantha Clark (‘18) and Gina Pollack (‘16). All have gone on to interesting careers at at outlets like National Geographic, The Players’ Tribune, The Associated Press, The Sacramento Bee and as freelance photographers contributing images to the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, TIME Magazine and The Guardian. Three were chosen for the prestigious Eddie Adams Workshop in upstate New York.

Jim Marshall in a limo with The Mamas & the Papas, 1967. (Courtesy Jim Marshall Photography LLC)

About Jim Marshall

A child of immigrants, Marshall had an innate curiosity about the people and the social issues dominating the latter half of the 20th century. And he had incredible timing, capturing decisive moments of some of the most iconic figures in music history: among them, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, and Miles Davis. Throughout his groundbreaking career, Marshall crossed boundaries to record an extraordinary period of history. His images of protest, civil unrest, and poverty, along with his stunning photography of the American jazz scene, San Francisco’s Summer of Love, and the early New York folk scene, are powerful. His famously, or infamously, abrasive but honest approach, combined with an incredible skill to build trust, allowed Marshall exceptional access to his subjects and enabled him to expand his portfolio beyond celebrities, to document history across the ages. In 2014, four years after his death, Marshall was honored with the Recording Academy’s Trustees Award (a Grammy Award) from the Recording Academy, for his contribution to chronicling music history.

Support the Next Generation of Documentary Photographers

While photography was once a specialized art, it is now an indispensable skill practiced in some form by nearly all our graduate students. In 2014, Berkeley Journalism’s Center for Photography joined with the estate of photographer Jim Marshall to launch the Jim Marshall Fellowships in Photography. Our goal is to raise $500,000 in funds dedicated to supporting the visual arts at the School. To contribute to this fund, email Assistant Dean of Advancement Steve Katz or mail a check, payable to the UC Berkeley Foundation, with Berkeley Journalism/FN0340000 in the notes field to:

University of California, Berkeley
Donor and Gift Services
1995 University Avenue, Suite 400
Berkeley, CA 94704-1070