About Jason Houston
Cliché mirror-selfie-with-camera and early pandemic hair, Boulder, Colorado.
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.
Jason has worked in over 30 countries—many of them many times, sometimes traveling abroad over 200 days a year—producing photojournalism, personal documentaries, multimedia art, and short films. He embeds with the people he photographs and in their lives—often using various socially engaged methods—to produce stories that transcend outsiders’ preconceptions and assumptions, engaging the people he photographs as collaborators rather than subjects in a search for truth beyond the facts. Jason’s work brings to life authentic narratives that recognize agency, authorship, and sovereignty for those in front of the camera, and inform conversations toward social and environmental justice. His work has been recognized, published, exhibited, premiered, and presented online, in print, and at venues worldwide.
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 art and media on racial justice, Indigenous-centered voices, and decolonization of humanity’s relationships with Earth and each other.
Downloading and backing up—a week up river, and going on two months in the field—documenting illegal mining and narco landgrabs in the Peruvian Amazon. (photo Chris Fagan)