Claudia Andujar was born in Neuchatel [Switzerland] in 1931, and then moved to Oradea, on the border betwe-en Romania and Hungary, where her paternal family, of Jewish origin, lived. In 1944, with the persecution of Jews during World War II, she fled with her mother to Switzerland and later immigrated to the United States. In New York, she studied painting and worked as an interpreter at the United Nations.
In 1955, Andujar arrived in São Paulo [Brazil] to meet her mother and decided to settle in the country, whe-re she started her career as a photographer. Without speaking Portuguese, photography became tool, a form of contact between her and the people from Brazil. Over the following decades, she collaborated with Brazilian and international magazines such as Life, Aperture, Look, Claudia, Quatro Rodas and Setenta. In 1966, she joined the first team of photographers of the magazine Realidade.
In 1971, she received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation to research the Yanomami people from Brazilian Amazon. From 1978 to 2000, Andujar worked for the NGO Commission Pro-Yanomami and co-ordinated the campaign for the demarcation of the Yanomami territory that was officially established by Brazilian government in 1993.
In 2000, she won the Annual Prize for Cultural Free-dom [Photography] as a defender of the Human Rights from the Lannan Foundation in New Mexico (USA). In 2003, she received the Severo Gomes Award from the Teotônio Vilela Commission for the Human Rights, São Paulo (Brazil), and in 2005, the Best Photography Exhibition award from the APCA [São Paulo Association of Art Critics], with her solo show A Vulnerabilidade do Ser [The Vulnerability of the Being], held at the Pinacoteca do Estado [São Paulo].
In 2008 she was honored by Brazil’s Ministry of Culture for her artistic and cultural achievements. In 2018 she was honored with the Goethe-Medaille 2018, in Weimar. In 2024 she was awarded the Rank of Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters, one of the four primary distinctions from the ministerial orders of the French Republic.