Director Biography – Danielle Da Silva, Jeffrey Garriock (PWB SERIES: MOUNTAINS UNITED)

Danielle Khan Da Silva is an internationally-acclaimed and award-winning photographer//writer/director, as well as a conservationist, scholar and activist with mixed ancestry derived from Central/South Asia, Europe and Micronesia. Danielle is most passionate about using storytelling to connect people to the earth and to each other. Danielle was the first female photographer/director to be an artist-in-residence at the Hermann & Audrey agency in Toronto; here she started her filmmaking career in the music video industry before transitioning to commercial advertising, and finally into short documentaries. Danielle is the creator and director of the Photographers Without Borders Series, a series of stand-alone or stand-together short films that each follow a talented and entertaining photographer working in the field with a grassroots cause somewhere in the world. Several of the films in the series have been screened at film festivals worldwide, and have earned several awards including the Los Angeles International Film Festival award for Best Documentary, and the Peoples’ Choice Documentary Award and the Judges’ Award at the Human Trafficking Awareness Film Festival.

Danielle has worked with hundreds of NGOs in over 80 countries, and learned more than 6 languages including English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, some Swahili and Indonesian (she can also read and write in Arabic). Most recently she is the recipient of a Canadian Top 30 Under 30 Sustainability Leaders Award, and was listed as number 2 in Matador Network’s Top 17 Female Photographers of 2017; she was also in their Top 5 Women Changing Media list; she was also nominated for the 2018 Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award. One of her first major lectures was a TEDx talk called “Grassroots Narrative,” and she has since gone on to do a second TEDx talk called “Connection is the Key to Conservation.”