Photographer and filmmaker Jason Houston explores how we live on the planet and with each other through community, culture, and the diversity of human experience. Through his work, he is committed to art and action that seeks to deconstruct colonial worldviews and dismantle white supremacy culture.
(photo Dewi Sungai Marquis-Houston)
Jason has worked in over 30 countries producing photojournalism, personal documentary, multimedia art, and short films. His work— often including various socially engaged approaches— brings to life authentic narratives that recognize agency, authorship, and sovereignty for those in front of the camera while informing broader truths toward social and environmental justice. His work has been recognized, published, exhibited, premiered, and presented online, in print, and at venues worldwide.
Through Jason’s travels and work, he has come to the faith that the Indigenous worldview, in comparison to the dominant anthropocentric and materialist world view, is critical to the survival of our planet and all the life it supports. This is not a romanticized notion. It is recognition of universal order and natural law. It is a call to understand and honor local place-based ways of knowing and being, and incorporate ancestral wisdom into our contemporary lives and collective future. It is with this respect for Indigenous sovereignty that Jason, as a descendant of colonizers and the colonized, works to decolonize his mind and actions, not as appropriation but to learn and share in love and service of all creation.
Jason is a grateful alumnus of the Missouri Photo Workshop, a Senior Fellow in the International League of Conservation Photographers, a Fellow at Wake Forest University’s Sabin Center for Environment and Sustainability, and the 2022 Environmental Peacemaking (EnPAx) Arts Fellow. His work has been published, exhibited, premiered, and presented around the world in outlets and venues ranging from The New York Times, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, National Geographic, Smithsonian, Science Magazine, WWF, and The Nature Conservancy, to Mountainfilm, SxSW, Harvard, Yale, Duke, the New Mexico Museum of Art, UNESCO, San Francisco Art Institute, and USAID.
In addition to his still photography, Jason runs eight16 creative with his life and creative partner Dewi Sungai, where they produce values-driven films, media, and art on racial justice, Indigenous-centered voices, and the decolonization of humanity’s relationships with Earth and each other.
jason@jasonhouston.com
Voice/SMS/Signal: +1 303 304 9193
Downloading and backing up—a week up river, and going on two months in the field—in the Peruvian Amazon. (photo Chris Fagan)