Zana Briski

Zana Briski is an Academy Award-winning director and photographic artist whose deepest love is the earth and her creatures.

Led by passion and intuition, Zana has traveled to 80 countries. She spent ten years on her project in the brothels of Calcutta where she lived, photographed, filmed and taught photography to the children of prostitutes. Her resulting film, BORN INTO BROTHELS, won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, an Emmy and 33 other awards.

Zana founded KIDS WITH CAMERAS, a non-profit organization which taught the art of photography to marginalized children around the world. She published a book of the children’s photographs, KIDS WITH CAMERAS, and self-published a collector’s edition of her own photographs, BROTHEL.

Her current project, REVERENCE, is inspired by visions of a praying mantis. Zana spent fifteen years photographing and filming insects in the wild around the world. REVERENCE is an exhibition of large-scale photographic artworks, a feature-length film and music, housed in a traveling museum eggpod designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect, Shigeru Ban.

Traveling to city parks around the world, REVERENCE will bring us face to face with insects as individual sentient beings, challenging our deeply held fears of otherness and encouraging us to find a more harmonious way to share the earth with other species.