Gregory Colbert

Gregory Colbert

Canadian-born artist Gregory Colbert began his career in Paris making documentary films about social issues. Filmmaking led to his work as a fine arts photographer, and the first public exhibition of his work was held in 1992 at the Musée de l’Elysée in Switzerland.

For the next ten years, Colbert showed no films and exhibited none of his art. Instead, he travelled to such places as India, Burma, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Dominica, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tonga, Namibia and Antarctica to film and photograph wondrous interactions between human beings and animals.

In 2002, he launched the Ashes and Snow exhibition in Italy at the Venice Arsenale, a 125,000-square-foot 15th-century shipyard owned by the Italian navy. It was the largest solo exhibition ever mounted in Italy. The Nomadic Museum debuted with the opening of Ashes and Snow in New York on the Hudson River’s Pier 54, and subsequently migrated to Santa Monica, California.

More than one million people have attended the show since the beginning of its journey in Venice. The project has been embraced by a general as well as a critical audience, and Gregory Colbert received the 2006 Lucie Award for Curator of the Year for the Ashes and Snow installation at the Nomadic Museum in New York and the 2007 THEA Award for Outstanding Achievement in a Museum or Touring Attraction.

Colbert continues his expeditions and the development of Ashes and Snow.