BIO
Jane Baldwin, an American artist and educator, uses photography, film and audio recordings to document her projects. Baldwin’s social documentary project, Kara Women Speak, is a multi-sensory, immersive body of work about women, culture, human rights and the environmental issues that threaten the communities of Ethiopia’s Omo River Valley and Kenya’s Lake Turkana watershed. In 2005 – 2014, Baldwin traveled annually to the region to document women’s stories in their own voices.
Initially, Baldwin traveled to Ethiopia’s Omo River Valley as a photographer. Her advocacy for the human rights and environmental concerns of Ethiopia’s Omo River Valley and Kenya’s Lake Turkana watershed developed slowly and are based on her lived experiences in the field. These experiences became an entry into the issues and fate of the communities of the Omo River Valley and Lake Turkana watershed.
The project has become an overlay of women’s stories told through photography, video, ambient sounds, and recorded interviews. Her goal is to give voice to the voiceless to reveal the humanity of the women, their communities and stories of their living culture. Baldwin has been able to provide additional opportunities for the women’s stories to be heard—stories of fear and concern about their future. Since 2014, she has continued to work on behalf of the Indigenous people of the Omo River through museum exhibitions and collaborations with international NGOs. Her work has been featured in selected exhibitions, publications, reviews, film festivals and online sites.
Baldwin was a founding board member of PhotoAlliance, founded in 2002, San Francisco, California. In 2012 - 2018, she also served a board member of International Rivers, Oakland, California. She holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Washington, and continuing credits in photography from UC Berkeley Extension. Baldwin resides in San Francisco, California.