Gabriela Bulisova, a native of the former Czechoslovakia, presently resides in Mount Rainier, Maryland. She is an MFA candidate in the Photography and Digital Imaging Program at the Maryland Institute College of Art/MICA, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Her primary photographic interest and artistic focus is in the realm of socially concerned documentary photography, corresponding with her strong belief in the artist’s political awareness, conscience, and responsibilities, and conversely, in arts vital potential for education, influence and change.

In 2002, she traveled to Iraq, as part of a humanitarian delegation of Physicians for Social Responsibility, delivering humanitarian and medical aid to hospitals and orphanages in Baghdad and Basrah. As an outcome of the journey, and in opposition to the impending threats of violent aggression against Iraq, she organized and coordinated a nation-wide traveling group exhibition of photographs from Iraq, entitled “Faces of Iraq”. This unique photographic exhibition brings together eight photographers whose images of Iraq and the Iraqi people try to break down the distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The portraits they emphasize the similarities between the hopes, dreams, aspirations, thoughts and faces of the Iraqi and the American people. These images offer voices to the silenced and threatened, and reciprocally, offer a call for a dialogue with the American audience. For details: www.FacesofIraq.org

In 2003 she traveled with the Irish Chernobyl Children’s Project’s Humanitarian Aid Convoy to Belarus, as a photographer documenting the deliveries of humanitarian and medical aid to orphanages, asylums, hospitals and other institutions in Belarus. In the summer of 2004, she went back to Ukraine and Belarus, to gather more visual documentation, to expand on the project, and to develop a concept for a longer-term photographic endeavor entitled “Life on the Edge: Half-Lives, Half-Truths of Chernobyl”, proposing to document life on the edge of the 20-mile Chernobyl exclusion zone, which divides -- physically and psychologically – centuries-old settlements, whether by visible, all-too-present fences or invisible, deniable radioactive contamination.

In 2004 she was a fellow at the National Graduate Photography Institute at Columbia University in New York City. She is a winner in the 2004 Photo District News/PDN student category and a recipient of the 2004 CANON Explorer of Light award, as well as a recipient of Puffin’s 2002 and 2005 grant for a photo-documentary projects.