Date/Time
Date(s) - Tuesday, September 15, 2020
7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Categories
Our guest speaker tonight will be Leah den Bok, with her presentation “People and Homelessness”.
Outline
In this presentation the award winning photographer, author, and homeless advocate, Leah den Bok, will show the photographs and share the stories of some of the people experiencing homelessness whom she has met over the past five years while travelling to major cities throughout the world.
Bio
Leah is a 20-year-old photography student at Sheridan College in Oakville. She will be beginning her third year of a four-year Bachelor of Photography program this fall. Since the age of 13, she has been mentored by Joel Sartore, a National Geographic photographer and Fellow.
For the past four years, Leah has been traveling to cities throughout the world, such as Toronto, New York, Washington D.C., and Brisbane Australia, photographing the homeless and recording their stories. At the end of 2019 Austin McCauley Publishers released her third book called “Nowhere to Call Home–Photographs and Stories of the Homeless, Volume Three”.
In the summer of 2017 CBC’s ‘The National’ aired a documentary about Leah’s photography and stories of people experiencing homelessness. Since then Leah’s work has attracted worldwide attention. In the fall of 2017, the BBC ran a story about her, as have newspapers in the United States and the Netherlands. In 2018 the Corriere della Sera, Italy’s largest daily, did a two-page spread about Leah.
Leah has won high praise from her peers. The veteran Toronto photographer, Mike Jordan, wrote of Leah that she is an “emerging superstar.” Well known Hamilton-based street photographer, Alex Zafer, called her a “mega talent.”
Leah attended, by invitation, ARTWALK NY 2017 and the Women of the World 2018 festival in Brisbane, where her work was exhibited. In 2017, she shared the stage with Prince Harry and Kofi Annan, (former U.N. Secretary General) at the Air Canada Centre for the WE Day and WE Family events where she addressed 40,000 people. Leah has been a keynote speaker at the annual She Talks events in Cambridge and Muskoka. Recently, Leah entered into a partnership with the Salvation Army Canada, and is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at several of their upcoming ‘Hope in the City’ events in cities, such as Toronto, Hamilton, and Sudbury.
Leah has won several awards, including the IDRF Youth Impact Award 2018, Murray Clerkson Award 2019, SNAP Photo Competition 2020, and Ascend Rising Star of the Year Award 2020.
Contacts
https://leahdenbok.wordpress.com
https://www.facebook.com/leah.denbok