Claudia Andujar was born in Switzerland in 1931 and soon moved to Oradea, at the frontier of Romania and Hungary, where her paternal family, of Jewish origin, lived. In 1944, with the persecution of the Jewish during the Second World War, she escape with her mother to Switzerland and later emigrated to the United States to live with an uncle. In New York, she developed an interest for painting and worked as a guide at the UN headquarters. In 1955, she came to Brazil to be reunited with her mother and decided to settle down in the country, where she began a career as a photographer. Having no knowledge of Portuguese, Andujar turned photography into a tool not just for work but also for getting in touch with the country. Over the following decades, she traveled through Brazil and collaborated with national and international magazines such as Life, Aperture, Look, Cláudia, Quatro Rodas and Setenta. In 1966, she began working as a freelancer for the magazine Realidade. She received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation (1971 and 1977) and took part in many exhibitions in Brazil and abroad, notably the 27th São Paulo Biennial and the exhibition Yanomami, at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art (Paris, 2002). This year, the artist was awarded the Goethe medal of 2018 by the German government.
