Mona Van den Berg is a Dutch freelance photographer.
What she loves most as a photographer is working on big projects where she can take responsibility for the story being told. she always focuses on stories that are not told enough in mainstream media, or not from a compassionate angle. Since 2015, she has been editor-in-chief of an (ongoing) series of supplements for daily newspaper Trouw. The daily gives her a free hand editorially and she tells the story of, for example, disabled people's rights, the consequences of human trafficking and children's rights. In doing so, she works closely with both journalists and NGOs and takes all the photos in the supplements.
Her career is dedicated to fighting injustice. This started when she worked as a social worker in a women's shelter after graduating from the Academy of Social Work. This work inspired her to study further, so she went to law school. During these studies, she focused on human rights and eventually graduated in International Law/Human Rights and Immigration and Asylum Law.
However, her later work as a lawyer turned out not to be so satisfying. It frustrated her that the rules on asylum were becoming increasingly strict. It also turned out that she was not very comfortable with an office job. She decided that she wanted to make visible what was happening in the world and introduce people to faces living on the fringes of our societies. She wanted to make visible what is often invisible happy
