10-24-2021 Women to Watch - Flipbook - Page 18
25 WOMEN TO WATCH
MONICA GUERRERO VAZQUEZ
38, executive director, Centro SOL, Johns Hopkins University
School of Medicine
As a girl in Spain, teachers told Monica Guerrero Vazquez that people like her — she was a poor immigrant from Ecuador — didn’t go
to college. Now a first-generation college graduate with two master’s
degrees to boot, Vazquez just guided her organization — Centro SOL,
the Johns Hopkins Center for Salud/Health and Opportunities for Latinos — through the coronavirus pandemic, instituting mental health
initiatives and coronavirus education campaigns for Baltimore’s Latino
community. After seven years serving her community, she only sees opportunity. “Why aren’t we hiring bilingual young people that we have in
the city? Why aren’t we empowering them?”
— Alex Mann
PHOTO BY LLOYD FOX
ROSEM MORTON
30, photojournalist and part-time nurse at UMMC
She has tugged at heartstrings with her poignant photo essays of
the pandemic, as seen through the lens of a hospital nurse; before that,
Rosem Morton captured the essence of a rape survivor with a personal,
if stark, pictorial portfolio.
Her work has been featured in National Geographic and The New
York Times, and on NPR and CNN. It has thrust Morton, 30, of East Baltimore, into the limelight as a both a photojournalist and part-time operating room nurse at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
“Photography is a means to process my trauma in life, and I hope it
helps others to heal as well,” she said. “That’s where I get the motivation
to be vulnerable.”
— Mike Klingaman
PHOTO BY KARL M. FERRON
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