Puerto Rican b, 1975
Carlos Javier Ortiz was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico and raised in Chicago, Illinois. As a teenager, his love of photography led him to work at a traveling carnival to save money for photography equipment and college tuition. He studied photography at Columbia College Chicago.

In 2009 he won the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Photography award for “Too Young To Die, ” his multi-year, comprehensive examination of youth violence in the United States and Central America. Carlos is a contributing photographer with “Facing Change: Documenting America,” a non-profit collective of photographers and writers covering the under-reported aspects of America’s most urgent issues. 
He has taught graduate photojournalism at Northwestern University and has been a guest lecturer at numerous other colleges and universities. In 2011 he received the Open Society Institute Audience Engagement Grant; for Too Young to Die. His work is currently in collection at the Museum of contemporary photography in Chicago. Carlos Javier has focused on documenting society's most vulnerable communities across the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Israel and Palestine.

"Too Young to Die" has been supported by the following foundations: Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, Mansfield Institute for Social Justice and Transformation, Open Society Institute, Chicago Community Trust, MacArthur Foundation and the McCormack foundation.
For more information, please visit http://www.carlosjavierortiz.com/.