Marie-Hélène Carleton is a writer, photographer and filmmaker, based out of New York City, though she has lived in upstate New York, New Hampshire and Wyoming, and has worked extensively overseas in conflict and post-conflict regions including Pakistan, Lebanon, southeastern Turkey and Iraq.
She is the co-founder of Four Corners Media, a documentary organization working in still photography, video, and print media.
Marie-Hélène is the co-author, with Micah Garen, of American Hostage, published in October 2005 by Simon & Schuster. American Hostage is a memoir of working in Iraq as a filmmaker and reporter, and Micah’s subsequent kidnapping, and her involvement, with many others, to help bring about his release. The book follows the ten days of the kidnapping, and alternates between their two voices and experiences.
American Hostage received two stars in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, who called it “an incredible told with intensity by two very lucky people”. Chris Matthews, of Hardball, said "What a great book", and The Washington Post Book World wrote, "The authors' nuanced accounts of their psychological rollercoaster rides make their book consistently compelling."
Marie-Hélène has written stories, taken photographs, done photo essays, and produced short documentaries for The New York Times, the New York Times Digital, the Financial Times, the Financial Times Magazine, the Associated Press, Associated Press Television News, PBS, Archaeology magazine, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, L'espresso, Westside Productions, and Oxygen Media.
Her writing and photographs have also appeared in the book The Looting of the Iraq Museum, Baghdad, published by Abrams in 2004, and her photography has appeared in the book Water Culture, published by Trolley in 2003.
She is a member of the National Press Photographers Association, the PEN American Center and has attended the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation.
Marie-Hélène has been profiled on CBS Sunday Morning and has been interviewed about her experiences in Iraq and hostage situations on National Public Radio, MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews, Democracy Now!, the Today show, and Good Morning America, among others. Marie-Hélène has lectured about the hostage experience, Iraq, and women in Iraq at Yale University, the Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, Davidson College, Indiana University, and York College.
She is an alumna of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (she studied Political Science and French Literature there) and of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Relations (SAIS) where she received an MA degree (and focused on international economics and refugee studies).