About Candace Barbot

For over 25-plus years in the industry, Candace Barbot has held virtually every visual role: newspaper staff photojournalist, photo editor, new media trainer, multimedia producer, cinematography freelancer, long-form documentary director. Candace covered small-town Florida politics and global crises. She has filed breaking news from disaster scenes and spent years following a single character for a film.

Candace began her career as a Miami Herald staff photojournalist, where she was a key member of news teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 1993 for coverage of Hurricane Andrew and in 1998 for coverage of the devastating floods in Grand Forks, North Dakota. In 2000, Candace’s most deeply personal photographic project, a look at the poverty and violence ravaging Miami’s Liberty City, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography.

As the Herald evolved into a digital newsroom, Candace embraced emerging technologies and the convergence of media. As one of four founding members of the Herald’s Visual Journalism Department, she helped pioneer the creation of new storytelling models for the newspaper’s online audience.

Driven by a desire to diversify her skill set and expand into more thoughtful, less deadline-driven storytelling, Candace left the Herald in 2009 to focus on long-form documentary filmmaking. After graduating with top honors from the School of Visual Arts MFA Social Documentary Film program, Candace began working with accomplished producers in New York. In addition to working for others, she filmed and produced her first feature-length documentary, “Detroit Dog City,” which premiered at the 2015 FREEP Film Festival in Detroit. In conjunction with that film, Discovery Channel optioned a one-hour ‘one-off’ program that aired on Animal Planet.


Based in the South Florida and New York areas, Candace works as a director/cinematographer. As part of her long-term commitment to meaningful projects, Candace is Visual Lead for a non-profit whose Overwatch+Project initiative is a national social norm changing campaign aimed at preventing veteran suicide by firearm [overwatchproject.org].