Zana Briski is an Academy Award-winning director and photographic artist. She has spent 35 years travelling alone to remote wild places, photographing animals from the smallest insect to the largest whale. Her work transmits wonder and awe, reflecting her profound commitment to the natural world and an urgent call to witness its rapid disappearance.

“While I am on nature’s time, I feel an urgency to communicate my vision of the natural world as I watch species after species rapidly disappear from the planet by human hand,” says Zana.

In NIGHT WILD – PHOTOGRAMS OF ANIMALS MADE IN THE WILD, Zana has deepened her connection to and collaboration with wild animals by taking the camera out of the picture. She creates one-of-a-kind, life-sized photograms of wild animals at night in the field. These photographic prints are made directly onto light-sensitive photographic without a camera, lens or negative—only time, presence, and trust.

From Africa to Australia, Brazil to Borneo, Zana embarks on unhurried five-month long expeditions. She has collaborated with American black bears, black rhino, African elephants, crab-eating fox, aye-aye, South American tapir, capybara, giant anteater, Southern cassoway, Western grey kangaroos, coatimundi, striped skunks and Malayan civet, as well as smaller creatures such as praying mantids, cicadas, moths and beetles.

Working patiently on moonless nights, Zana lays out large sheets of silver gelatin photographic paper. Once the paper is in position, she sits alone in the dark just a few feet from the paper and waits for an animal to pass by. She waits night after night. She does not use a hide and is fully visible to the animals. This takes tremendous trust, awareness, openness and stillness.

When an animal appears, Zana make a quick exposure with a small handheld flash, minimal enough to go unnoticed. After the animal disappears into the forest, she collects the paper and later develops the print in her darkroom. Only then does the image reveal itself.

The animal leaves a ‘white shadow’ where the paper remains unexposed. Exposed areas turn black or shades of gray depending on the light exposure. Plants, rocks, insects and even raindrops are recorded in unpredictable ways. Occasionally an animal will leave footprints or chew the paper.

The result is a unique and magical direct impression of a wild animal onto photographic paper. What emerges is not an image of an animal, but a physical imprint of an encounter—part shadow, part apparition. The effect is visceral and profound.

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Zana Briski is an Academy Award-winning director and photographic artist whose deepest love is the earth and her creatures. Born in London in 1966, Zana earned a master’s degree from the University of Cambridge before moving to New York City where she gained a certificate in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography from the International Center of Photography.

Zana first traveled to India in 1995 to document the lives of women. In 1997, she discovered Kolkata’s red-light district and spent months at a time living in a brothel, photographing the women and later teaching their children photography. This led to the creation of her first film, Born Into Brothels, which won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, an Emmy and 33 other awards.

Zana received fellowships from the Open Society Institute, the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the Lucie Humanitarian Award, a first prize from the World Press Photo Foundation, a Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize and the Howard Chapnick Grant for the Advancement of Photojournalism. In 2002, Zana founded Kids with Cameras, a non- profit organization which taught the art of photography to marginalized children around the world. She published a collection of the children’s photographs, Kids With Cameras and self-published a collector’s edition of my own work, Brothel. Zana raised over $250,000 for the children and their educations by selling their own artwork.

Zana’s project Reverence is inspired by an unexpectedly transformative encounter with a praying mantis. It is fifteen years in the making and she has photographed and filmed in over 30 countries. Reverence is a traveling exhibition of large-scale photographic artworks, a feature-length film and music, housed in a migrating museum designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect, Shigeru Ban. Bringing us face to face with insects as individual sentient beings, Reverence challenges our deeply held fears of otherness.

Since 2015, Zana has combined her 40 years of experience in traditional black and white analogue photography with her deep connection to wild animals in Night Wild – Photograms of Animals Made in the Wild. Night Wild premiered at a solo exhibition at the Edwynn Houk Gallery and at The Armory Show in New York in 2023. She received the New York Foundation of the Arts/Joy of Giving Something Award and a LensCulture Critics’ Award. This work was exhibited at The International Center of Photography in New York in 2025 and has been acquired by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Wellin Museum, New York and The New York Public Library. Her work is also in the collections of the Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA, FAR Center for Contemporary Arts, Bloomington, IN, The Light Work Collection, Syracuse, NY, Fondation Cartier, Paris, the Bibliothèque National de France, Paris and Museum Hanmi, Seoul, Korea.