•For the last three decades, John Willis has taught photography at Marlboro College in Vermont, as well as founded and run a non-profit program called In-Sight Photography Project in Brattleboro, which offers youth photo courses and cross-cultural exchanges from the South Bronx to South Dakota. During that period he also regularly visited and worked on the Pine Ridge Reservation, home of the Oglala Lakota Sioux, and more recently, the Navajo Nation in Arizona, focusing with his House/Home series on the extreme inequality he saw in the housing stock available to the region’s indigenous inhabitants. Over the course of several extended visits to Lakota territory, Willis, acting as witness and recorder, went on to document numerous demonstrations against the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline taking place on the sovereign lands of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation. Beginning in 2016, Willis chronicled the groundswell of public support for the Lakota peoples and their land that took the form of peaceful indigenous-led resistance by a loose-knit group that came to be known as the Water Protectors. These coordinated protests involved tens of thousands of people from all walks of life and more than 300 Indian nations who joined together to stand against the incursion of the DAPL into the region flanking the Missouri and Cannonball Rivers. The resulting photographic series and 2019 publication are entitled, Mni Wiconi: Water is Life.

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