Artist
Zana Briski
Via New York, NY, USA
Zana Briski is an Academy Award-winning director and artist whose deepest love is the earth and its creatures. Led by passion and intuition, Briski has traveled to over 70 countries. Her current project, Reverence, is inspired by dreams of a praying mantis. For nine years, Briski photographed and filmed insects in the wild, treating them not as scientific curiosities but as individual sentient beings. Reverence is a traveling exhibit of large-scale photographic artworks, a film and music, housed in a traveling museum designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect, Shigeru Ban. The exhibit is traveling to city parks around the world, inspiring wonder and awe and encouraging us to find a more harmonious way to live on the earth.
Briski also spent ten years on her project in the brothels of Calcutta where she photographed, filmed and taught photography to the children of prostitutes. Her film, Born into Brothels, won an Academy Award, an Emmy and many other awards. She is also the founder of Kids with Cameras, a non-profit organization which strives to transform the lives of marginalized children through learning the art of photography.
