Glenn Ruga, Founder & Director, Social Documentary Network. Executive Editor, ZEKE magazine, is a photographer, graphic designer and curator. He founded the Social Documentary Network (SDN) in 2008 as a web platform for a global community of documentary photographers to present their work online. As a photographer, he has created traveling and online documentary exhibits on the struggle for a multicultural future in Bosnia, the war and aftermath in Kosovo, and on an immigrant community in Holyoke, Mass.
In 2015, Ruga launched ZEKE: The Magazine of Global Documentary, a print and digital magazine presenting the best stories from the Social Documentary Network.
From 2010-2013, Ruga was the Executive Director of the Photographic Resource Center (PRC) at Boston University. He curated numerous exhibitions while at the PRC including “Global Health in Focus” featuring work by Kristen Ashburn, Dominic Chavez, and David Rochkind. Ruga is also the former Publisher and Art Director of Loupe, the magazine of the PRC.
From 1993 through 2009, Ruga was the founder and president of the Center for Balkan Development, a non-profit organization established to help stop the genocide in Bosnia and create a just and sustainable future in the former Yugoslavia.
Glenn has a B.A. in Social Theory from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and a MFA in Graphic and Advertising Design from Syracuse University.
ZEKE Awards winners explore the stories of Galicia, reflecting the community’s struggle to adapt and endure in the face of change, and how thirty years after the 1994 Rwandan genocide, survivors and perpetrators have forged remarkable partnerships in a profound journey of reconciliation and healing.
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ZEKE Award first-place winners explore the Indigenous Evenki reindeer herders in northwest Russia and the forest guardians protecting the Peruvian jungle from illegal logging and development.
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2023 ZEKE Award winners include visual stories on resistance against extractive industries in Ecuador, violence against women in Ethiopia, the Vatican apology to the Indigenous community in Canada, a thriving Queer community in Appalachia and others.
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Presented by Social Documentary Network, ZEKE Magazine
These documentary exhibits explore sustainable solutions to the climate crisis: the Indigenous People’s Burn Network in the western United States; Nemo’s Garden in Italy — the world’s first underwater greenhouse; the African Women Rising’s Permagarden Program in Uganda, and others.
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Last Wildest Places by Jason Houston, focuses on deforestation in the Purús-Manu region in southeastern Peru. Cousins by Kristen Emack, is a poetic look at the photographer’s daughter and her three cousins, and their intimate involvement in each other’s lives.
Toby Binder and Rory Doyle are first place winners of the ZEKE Award for Documentary Photography, a new honor presented by the Social Documentary Network. Sponsors include Digital Silver Imaging, Canson-Infinity, and Leica.
LiveZEKE is a new way to experience documentary photography, combining live video conferencing and traditional documentary practice.
Learn MoreThis panel discussion will explore where documentary photography is heading in the second decade of the 21st century.
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