Celebrated documentary photographer and filmmaker, Nance Ackerman has been making images and film around the world for over 30 years. Her documentary photography work has been featured in Time, Newsweek, Canadian Geographic, New York Times, and Canada's national newspaper, the Globe and Mail. She was the photo editor at the Montreal Gazette for several years before going freelance. She's covered the war in the middle east, Afghanistan, AIDS crisis in Africa, Terrorism in Borno State. She's been in the Barrios of Colombia's most dangerous city covering the drug cartels, travelled with migrants crossing the borders in Guatemala and spent time with the children in the dumps of Delhi. Her work has been described as ‘artivism’ - creating art to create change. Striving to build bridges of understanding, common ground and a global awareness of human behaviour on this planet, her work quickly grew too large for the daily news cycle. After being dragged across the barricade while covering/protesting at Oka, she started on a journey of discovery of her Mohawk heritage. The result, her photographs of First Nations women, have been exhibited at the Aperture Foundation in New York and the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC. Following that, Ackerman's book, Womankind: Faces of Change Around the World – a collection of portraits and essays of women activists around the world – was released in 2003.
In 2005 Ackerman turned her eye to directing award winning social documentary films for CBC, documentary Channel, National Film Board and Television Ontario. Exploring our broken justice system (Conviction), child poverty in the first world (Four Feet Up) and celebrating joyous activism (Behind the Bhangra Boys). She's documented the women saving our forests (In the Quiet and the Dark) and is now in production travelling the world spending time with Midwives on the frontlines of war and crisis (The Delivery Line). Nance has dedicated her career to helping people find their voice and tell their story. From Afghanistan to Nova Scotia, Colombia to Nigeria, Nance truly sees the world a little differently and shares that, intimately and cinematically, with her audiences. She also edits, does sound design and composes musical scores for film and television with her partner, Jamie Alcorn, at their studio, Heartstring Productions in Nova Scotia.
Buy one of Nance’s Books
Nance was a part of two group collections - both featuring Native American photographers, and her own collection of portraits of women activists around the world.
All of them are still available on Amazon or Thriftbooks.
