Kristen Emack

Kristen Emack is a photographer and public school educator who lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and holds a degree in Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Kristen is a Mass Cultural Council Photography Fellow. She is a Critical Mass Top 50 Winner, a Michael Reichmann Project Grant recipient, a PDN Emerging 30 nominee, and her images are on Photoville’s The FENCE for the second time. Her interview in VOGUE Italia was published in February 2020, and was recently selected the 2nd place series winner in LensCulture Portraits. Kristen’s work includes two ongoing projects that look at childhood, family and visibility, and a finished series that looks at loss.

Jason Houston

Jason Houston was introduced to the Amazon region in 2015, as part of a team from Science Magazine, investigating the possible causes for a dramatic increase in contact events between isolated tribes and remote villagers. He has since returned a dozen times with Upper Amazon Conservancy and other organizations, to try and better understand the tenuous relationship between isolated tribes and settled Indigenous communities, and how loggers, drug traffickers, illegal mining, and new roads are encroaching on protected areas and driving these conflicts.

Jason has partnered with many organizations including The Nature Conservancy, WWF, UNESCO, USAID, and the Pulitzer Center on projects ranging from wildland firefighting in the American west, and maternal healthcare in Haiti and Nepal, to small-scale fisheries throughout the developing tropics. His work has been published editorially, and exhibited around the world, and he is a Senior Fellow at the International League of Conservation Photographers, and a Fellow at Wake Forest University’s Center for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability.

Nicolò Filippo Rosso

Nicolò Filippo Rosso is an Italian documentary photographer based in Colombia. Photographing in Latin America is often about witnessing stories of trauma, inequality, and injustices that have shattered the region for generations. Rosso tells stories of abandoned communities, mass migration crises, conflict, and climate change. Since 2018, after numerous editorial assignments documenting Venezuelan migration in Colombia, Rosso decided to work on that historical phenomenon personally. He started spending weeks and months in some of the border areas—walking along the migration routes with those who have no money to reach a major city or the next border by bus. In 2021, expanding an already-existing body of work, he traveled to Central America and Mexico to document the crossing of refugees and migrants into the United States. In addition to his personal and editorial work for magazines, newspapers, and NGOs, he often lectures about photography and journalism at universities in Colombia, Europe, and the United States.

Social Documentary Network (SDN)

The Social Documentary Network (SDN), founded in 2008, is a global community of documentary photographers, editors, curators, NGOs, journalists, and others, who believe in the power of visual storytelling to build understanding and appreciation for the complexities, diversity nuances, wonders, and contradictions that abound in the world today.

Since our founding, the SDN website has featured more than 4,000 exhibits by nearly 3,000 photographers from all corners of the globe.

Our flagship publication, ZEKE: The Magazine of Global Documentary, is printed twice a year in print and year-round in digital, and features the most successful projects from the SDN website.

We also create gallery exhibitions, educational programs, lecture series, award programs, and portfolio reviews.

Recent stories on SDN and in ZEKE have explored sustainable solutions to the climate crisis, the war in Gaza, migration from Central America to the U.S., the war in Ukraine, the COVID-19 pandemic, the rising seas of Antarctica, life in Iran, asylum in America, teen mothers, and many other global themes.