About
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 traveling to remote wild places to photograph and film insects. Working alone at night, Zana is enraptured with each magnificent creature she meets. Her insect portraits take hours of collaboration as she holds eye contact and allows for a deep merging of consciousness.
REVERENCE, the migrating museum, brings us face to face with insects as individual sentient beings. Housed in an exquisite pavilion resembling a praying mantis eggpod, it displays large-scale photographic artworks and a feature-length film with music.
REVERENCE will travel to city parks around the world, inspiring wonder and awe and challenging our deeply held fears of otherness.
Zana photographs using 35mm black and white film and Leica macro and Widelux panoramic cameras. In her desire to get even closer to the animals she so loves, Zana has recently given up the camera altogether, working directly with animals in the wild to make unique photograms directly onto light-sensitive papers, which she later processes in her darkroom.
