Program Staff

Gary Knight
Program Founder and Director

For the past 20 years, Gary Knight has covered many of the world’s significant current affairs stories, including over 20 wars and many human rights issues, health care stories and natural disasters. He has worked in over 90 countries on every continent for the world’s leading media organizations, including Newsweek magazine for which he worked for ten years as a contract photographer. His work has been widely published by magazines all over the world, exhibited globally, and is in
the collections of Museums worldwide. He has been the recipient of numerous high profile international awards.

Knight’s early career began in South East Asia in the late 1980s, where he followed the traditional path of the photojournalist; living amongst the stories he was photographing, in his case the wars in Burma and Cambodia. By 1993, he had moved to the former Yugoslavia and become immersed in the subject that would come to dominate his photography during that period: that of documenting the effects of war on civilian populations, specifically war crimes and crimes against humanity.

After pioneering the launch of the VII Photo Agency in September 2001, Knight followed the development of events in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. He was one of only a few non-embedded photographers covering the invasion of Iraq alongside the U.S. Marines. Within three years of its founding, VII was named the third most important entity in Photography by American Photo Magazine.

In June 2008, Knight launched a new publishing company, which publishes the quarterly magazine, Dispatches, a cutting edge single issue journal which examines the greatest global challenges of our time. In each edition, Dispatches focuses 25,000 words and up to 100 pages of photography on one crucial issue.

Knight is very engaged in educational outreach and has initiated a broad education program with Universities and NGO’s worldwide, principally focused on educating emerging photographers from developing economies.

Knight is also a founder of the Angkor Photo Festival, a board member of the Crimes of War Foundation, a subject of the award winning CBC film on photojournalism “Beyond Words”, a trustee of the Indochina Media Memorial Foundation, Juror and past Chairman of the World Press Photo Award, Vice President of the Pierre & Alexandra Boulat Foundation, Chairman of the StopTB/WHO Partnership Advisory Board, permanent member of the Frontline Club Award jury, a brand Ambassador for Canon Inc and a contract photographer for Newsweek Magazine.

In 2009-10, Gary Knight was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

Samuel James
Program Coordinator

Samuel James is from Cincinnati, Ohio. He holds a degree in political science from Tufts University and studied photography at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Since 2007, he has been working on an extensive independent documentary engagement with Nigeria, Africa’s most populous and largest oil-producing nation. He is the inaugural recipient of the Exposure Alexandra Boulat Award for Photojournalism, with which he continued exploring the realm of Area Boys in Lagos. He has also completed assignments for publications such as The New York Times and Time magazine. While at Tufts, he was selected into the inaugural group of Institute for Global Leadership Synaptic Scholars and was a member of the photojournalism and human rights group Exposure.