Click here to visit Jason Houston's primary portfolio website: www.jasonhouston.com

Jason Houston has worked in the visual arts his entire career. While finishing an ecology/evolution and philosophy double major at the University of California Santa Barbara he began by photographing outdoor adventure sports for magazines, commercial clients, and the occasional book project. These experiences led to a few years working in the cycling industry in marketing, design and art direction before returning to the editorial world. For the last decade Jason has been almost exclusively focused on social and environmental issues. He has worked independently and on assignment in over a dozen countries and across the U.S. on issues including poverty in Africa, growing up in suburban America, socially conscious conservation and development throughout the developing tropics, fisheries in the Gulf of California, and local and sustainable food and agriculture in the U.S.

Much of his focus has been in finding creative collaborations with various non-governmental organizations and his images have been used thousands of times in hundreds of stories in print, online, and broadcast media outlets including The New York Times Sunday Magazine, CNN.com, Daylight Magazine, German GEO, New York Magazine, Newsweek.com, Playboy, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Discover, Bike, and many others. Prints and projections of his work have been shown in exhibitions including Spike Gallery in New York City, Rayko Gallery in San Francisco CA, Ferrin Gallery in Western MA, Yale University, the deCordova Museum, the Berkshire Museum, Mountainfilm in Telluride, CO, and other galleries, museums, and public spaces across the country.

In addition to his work in photography Jason has more recently also taken on video and multimedia, producing audio enhanced slideshows and short video productions for NGO and editorial clients. One recent project, Stone River: The Passion of Jon Piasecki, a short documentary made with Hal Clifford that premieres summer 2010 at Mountainfilm in Telluride, CO and the Berkshire International Film Festival in Great Barrington, MA.

Jason has also worked for the past 6 years as picture editor for Orion, an award-winning bi-monthly magazine exploring the relationships between people and nature with art, literature, reporting through a diverse array of cultural lenses. In this capacity he has served as a juror and curator for exhibitions and competitions including the Lucies, the Lishui International Photography Festival (China), and Lightwork's annual show for the graduating class at the Newhouse School for Journalism. Jason has also done many portfolio reviews for a variety of photography organizations including Fotofest, Center, PhotoLucida, International Center of Photography, PhotoNOLA, and PhotoAlliance; and regularly presents on his own work and the industry in general about where journalism and concerned documentary photography intersect with the arts and activism worlds.