2009 Key Note Speaker: Gregory Whitmore

Gregory Whitmore is an independent photographer, filmmaker, editor and media activist.

His most recent feature documentary, Kabul Transit debuted at the Full Frame Documentary Festival in 2006 and traveled to film festivals in the US, Canada, Europe and the Middle East. Kabul Transit was called "One of the most important films on the Middle East in recent years," by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. In the summer of 2001, Whitmore traveled to Peshawar, Pakistan to preserve a vast and endangered video and photographic archive made during the 1980s by Afghan journalists from the Afghan Media Resource Center. Upon returning, he helped to prepare the archive for an exhibit at the Asia Society in NYC.

In recent years he has worked with Shawn Rosenheim to produce a documentary about Biosphere 2, forthcoming in 2009, shot and edited two short documentaries about contemporary American photographers, and documented the anti-war movement in the US.

He is currently working with Folk Arts Rajasthan, a cultural preservation organization based in NYC, to create a short film about an double reed wind instrument called a murali. Built and played by the Merasi of Jaisalmer, Rajasthan (India), the murali is a musical tradition in danger. In 2009 there were fewer than six murali master performers in all of Rajasthan.

Entirely self taught in photography and film, Whitmore's only formal schooling in art was a class in color theory he took in high school and 8 months of rebus construction at his integrated deaf pre-school at the age of five.