My name is Shana Dressler and I am the founder of the Social Innovators Collective and the creator of the Social Good Guides, a series of 20 small-business guides for professionals founding nonprofits and social enterprises.
For details on these projects you can visit the sites: Social Innovators Collective and Social Good Guides.This site is an online portfolio of my artisitc journey from 1995 - 2009. 2009 marks the year that I transitioned from working in the media industry to the social impace space. The site has been designed as a non-linear journey. Choose a topic that intrigues you and begin your discovery from there.
EXPLORE: How exploration to 40+ countries has shaped my thoughts and creative endeavors.
- Outer World: The five photography and four music projects that I created from 1995-2009
- Inner World: My visual diaries from 1987 to 1990 and a meditation on personal transformation and how that leads to fulfilling on one's dreams
NAVIGATE: A graphic timeline of my projects from 1995-2009
INSPIRE: The people, places and things that have inspired me
GIVE: The creation of the Global Giving Circle, a network of individuals who came together in 2009 - 2010 to support creative and innovative solutions to alleviate poverty through tangible grassroots initiatives both locally and internationally.
In the site I share every aspect of what it is to dream: from day dreaming, to struggling with the meaning of a dream, to dreaming of a better world.
MY BIO FROM 2009
My career as a documentary journalist and producer spanned a wide range of forms, from stills to video to multimedia. In 2004 I founded Swimming Elephant Productions, a multimedia company through which I produced all of my projects. The last major multimedia photography project, Discovering Ganesh, explores the Hindu elephant-headed deity through an exhibition and website. Ganesh, one of India's most beloved Gods, has been revered for millennia as the Remover of Obstacles, the Lord of Beginnings and the Patron of the Arts.
In addition to Discovering Ganesh, I exhibited photographs from If Only It Were Love at New York University's gallery space, Casa Italiana, in 2004. The project tells the story of an unrequited love affair I had with one of Jacques Cousteau's underwater photographers while living in Rome in the early 1990s. From 1995 to 2000 I created The Spirit That Runs Through The Holy Tabernacle Church, a photo essay that captured the spiritual life of a Pentecostal church in Harlem. A portfolio of this work is part of the permanent collection of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.
As a video journalist I directed and co-produced Can't Wait 'Til Sunday, with National Geographic photographer/cameraman Bob Sacha. This 10-minute documentary, which profiles Carl J. Graham, the bishop of Harlem's Holy Tabernacle Church, was filmed on the last night of his 30-year career as a mechanic for the U.S. Postal Service. Additionally I produced three video shorts for Discovering Ganesh and an animation about cocoa farmers called Dia, The Magical Bike, for a philanthropic project called The Global Cocoa Project.
From 2004-2006 I worked at the Peabody award-winning satellite TV station, Link TV, which broadcasts eye-opening documentaries about the problems facing humanity and efforts to address them. I was so inspired by the programming and the viewers' expressed desire in becoming changemakers, that I began a career transition in 2006 which led me to found the Global Giving Circle in 2009.
In 2011, I launched the Social Innovators Collective. The organization's mission is to train and nurture the next wave of social change leaders so that they can demonstrate both measurable impact and achieve financially sustainability.Education and training: I studied photojournalism at New York's International Center of Photography from 1993-1996 and comparative religion and anthropology at Columbia University from 1991-1994. I graduated from Vassar College in 1989, with a B.A. in Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
FOR MY CURRENT BIO: CLICK HERE.
