Growing up in Porto Alegre, Brazil, Barbara Corbellini Duarte always had some sort of camera in her hands. She snapped pictures of her friends and classmates, even taking pictures during school field trips.
“I took the camera with me every day in school,” she said. “I wanted to keep those memories because I knew no one else would do that for me.”
When she was 12, she saved up $100 of her allowance and bought her own camera. Little did she know that camera purchase would turn into a valuable career investment.
Her passion for photography and video led her to Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, where she took courses in video production in 2007.
In 2008, Ms. Duarte and her mother moved to the Miami area, where she earned her associate’s degree at Broward College and was a freelance photographer.
“I really liked photography, but I really wanted to study journalism,” she said. “I always had that in my mind that I wanted to be a journalist.”
To complement her skills in photography and video production, in 2011 Ms. Duarte attended Florida International University, where she enrolled in intensive journalism writing courses while working for the school newspaper, The Beacon. She graduated in April.
“The school newspaper gave me a lot of experience,” she said. “It was my first step into journalism.”
During her time at F.I.U., Ms. Duarte also participated in internships at The Miami Herald, the Scripps Howard Foundation’s Semester in Washington program, The Naples Daily News and NBC News.
Ms. Duarte lives in Hollywood, Fla., where she is a full-time reporter and videographer at The Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale. She covers music, art, culture and lifestyles for the features section.
After her first day at The New York Times Student Journalism Institute, Ms. Duarte said she was inspired by the words of the program’s photo editor, Ángel Franco: “We aren’t going to be millionaires, but we are going to be monuments of information.”
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 22, 2014
An earlier version of this article misstated Ms. Duarte’s coursework at Broward College. She earned her associate’s degree at Broward, but did not take introductory video and photography courses there.