About Us

Our mission is to highlight and help facilitate
the power of photography to influence the world.

We help photography to be better understood,
created, utilized, seen, and saved.

PhotoWings is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to utilizing the power of photography to further deep thinking, communication, and action. Our extensive online content and PhotoWings Outreach Programs have a myriad of educational applications and possibilities.

Download a PDF of our PhotoWings Media Archive list here

 

View and download our brochure PDF here

Suzie Katz

PhotoWings Founder and President

Suzie Katz is a photographer, speaker, educator, producer, and is giving back to the world that has given her so much by creating and running an educational non-profit organization called PhotoWings. Their mission is to highlight and help facilitate the power of photography to influence the world. They help photography to be better understood, created, utilized, seen, and saved. Through PhotoWings, Suzie concentrates on bringing the photos, knowledge and skills gained through photography to the world across generations, cultures, and disciplines. To document and more richly utilize their legacy, PhotoWings has created, along with many innovative partners, 100’s of hours of interviews, presentations, and other educational content incorporating these ideas for replication, adaptation, or inspiration.

Selected PhotoWings Outreach Program Partners and Grantees

 

The VII Foundation

The VII Foundation challenges complex social, economic, environmental, and human rights issues through documentary non-fiction storytelling and education. Our partnership includes VII Insider with its freely available in-depth personal presentations, business and technical webinars, and writing on photography’s role in the world. The Foundry Photojournalism Workshop supports local photographers working to document their own communities (see more below). Our online global VII Community project connects former students from the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop and the VII Academy for continuing education and conversation. Lost Rolls America compiles the public’s lost rolls of film for a digital repository of visual memories (see more below). With VII Foundation and the YMCA of Greater Boston, Youth Voices teens worked long-term with professionals to develop their photographic and life skills.

 

Ashoka/Ashoka U

Ashoka addresses the world’s most urgent challenges with innovative solutions through its 4000+ social entrepreneurs in 90+ countries. Our partnership with Ashoka U, the university-based initiative of Ashoka with a network of Changemaker Campuses, created the webinar Self-Discovery Through Photography to advance changemaking skills. Our grant competition, InSights: Past, Present and Future Self Through Photography, awarded grants to projects on 9 Ashoka U changemaker campuses in 4 countries.

 

Blue Earth Alliance

Blue Earth Alliance’s fiscal sponsorship, administered by the Santa Fe-based non-profit CENTER, raises awareness about endangered cultures, threatened environments, and social concerns through photographers and their projects. PhotoWings funded mission-relevant equipment, project photographer business training, and documented presentations/conducted interviews at 3 of its Collaborations for Cause events. Our partnership funded its Photoville container and Blue Earth Alliance conducted portfolio reviews in our Photoville Festival tent.

 

CatchLight

CatchLight leverages the power of visuals to inform, connect and transform communities. Since 2017, our partnership has documented three Visual Storytelling Summits and interviewed presenters, created a Toolkit for Artists Against the Infodemic, and interviewed CatchLight fellows and Everyday Bay Area photographers. The CatchLight Local partnership links visual journalists with community-based newsrooms, produces in-depth visual projects, community activations, and workshops on visual memory and archives. Our CatchLight Local Education partnership created and distributed the “Field Guide to Visual Journalism”, a curriculum designed to foster community engagement, media literacy and intergenerational learning, to local and youth communities.

 

The Everyday Projects

The Everyday Projects and their ever-growing global community of photographers strives to make images that convey a more accurate view of daily life than what is commonly seen in the media by fostering new generations of storytellers and audiences that recognize the need for multiple perspectives in portraying the cultures that define us. Our seven-year partnership has helped develop visual literacy, empathy and communication skills through The Everyday Projects website, The Everyday Africa book and educational supplement, theater projects, educational videos, a middle/high school photojournalism curriculum, and Seasons 2 and 3 of The Essentials, online photo-based workshops created in partnership with Black Women Photographers.

 

Foundry Photojournalism Workshops

Foundry Photojournalism Workshop brings some of the world's most respected visual journalists to a different country each year to inspire and educate local photographers who are working to document their own communities. Since 2011, we have created an extensive online library of Foundry interviews, presentations and Lessons in the Field videos. In 2019, we brought this esteemed event to Kigali, Rwanda in partnership with The VII Foundation. In 2021, a virtual Foundry brought the Workshop to 72 students from 31 countries in 9 languages with presentations now available in 7 languages in our online archive. In 2022, a second virtual Foundry focused for the first time on students in the USA.

 

Global Nomads Group

Global Nomads Group (GNG) fosters dialogue and understanding among the world’s youth by working at the intersection of cultural exchange, international education, and conflict resolution. Since 2015, our partnership has integrated photography and photographic thinking into the GNG Student to World curricula and, most recently, into online courses designed by the student-led Content Creation Lab. Photography has also been incorporated into Seat at the Table, a safe and inclusive place where global youth between the ages of 15 and 19 connect, make friends, and share their ideas and experiences.

Lost Rolls America

Lost Rolls America ensures the creation of a national archive of images from the public’s lost rolls of film and acts as a digital repository of visual memories on PhotoShelter’s unique platform. The project examines the heightened role photography plays in how we document and remember our personal and shared pasts. Our partnership with Generation Human Rights on the Lost Rolls America interactive curriculum makes it possible for middle and high school students to explore photography as a platform to discover and cement common experience across disparate backgrounds of place, time, age, and race. During the pandemic, we developed Parent Activities, online lessons for families to foster a deep exploration of their photo archives whether found in a photo album, loose in a shoebox, or stored in the Cloud.

 

Photoville

Photoville amplifies and connects visual storytellers to diverse audiences worldwide

through its free photo festival set in Brooklyn Bridge Park with exhibitions in all five New York City boroughs, year-round activation of public spaces and community educational programming. Since 2017, we have partnered on the Photoville Festival Talks, Professional Development Labs, Educator-Created Lesson Plans, Youth Exchange Panels, Educator Exhibition Grants, Year-Round Education Artists Visits, Family Photography Evenings, and Teaching Artist Microgrants. We have also partnered on the Community Heroes public art project, Toolkit, and Outreach, a Festival website, Field Guide, an online archive, and resource guides for the My Park Moment photo show in San Francisco’s Presidio and the We Women Traveling Photo Exhibition.

 

LOOK3 Photography Festival 


 "Peace, love, and photography." LOOK3 celebrated the vision of extraordinary photographers, ignited conversations about critical issues, and fostered the next generation of artists in its time. PhotoWings had been proud to partner with the festival, supporting video documentation of presentations for posterity and accessibility to a wider audience. Presentations can be viewed on our website.

 

 

Inquiries may be sent to

info@photowings.org

PhotoWings + AshokaU Self-Discovery Through Photography Webinar

Watch: PhotoWings Content Sampler