Photojournalist and author of the book A Woman Like You: The Face of Domestic Violence

Program Title - A Woman Like You: The Face of Domestic Violence

Photojournalist Vera Anderson has shot thousands of well-known faces: Julia Roberts, Salma Hayek, Nicole Kidman, Cameron Diaz, and Mia Farrow, to name a few. But her most compelling portraits were inspired by stories of women who shot back-battered women who are in jail for killing their abusers. An outspoken advocate for fighting domestic violence, Anderson presents a powerful program about domestic abuse, survival, and ultimately, hope.

In 1991, Anderson read a newspaper account of members of a support group inside a California prison who had launched a letter-writing campaign to draw attention to battered women serving time their for killing their abusers. Fascinated by the stories of these women who survived broken bones and shattered spirits and who now were defending their own lives and suffering further abuse by the justice system, Anderson began a photo essay project on the subject. As she delved into the issue, she got calls and letters from women across America from every ethnic and economic strata-so different in some ways, yet all with strikingly similar stories. The end result was her book, a compelling collection of thirty four women and their accounts of what happened, why they stayed and how they did-or in some cases, didn't-survive to tell their tale.

Anderson has been a photojournalist since 1975. Working mostly within the Hollywood and advertising communities, she is the Los Angeles bureau chief of the Latin American Cine Premiere Magazine and a Golden Globe-voting member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Her book A Woman Like You: The Face of Domestic Violence won the 1998 Small Press Book Award, and she is currently developing a second book on the subject.