Russell Frederick

Russell Frederick is a Brooklyn- born photographer of Panamanian heritage. In the 20 years since his career began, exhibits of his work have won acclaim at photo festivals (Visa Pour L'Image, Photoville), museums  and arts institutions worldwide. His photojournalism has appeared on every major TV network, in newspapers from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal to the Amsterdam News, digital sites including NBC News, Slate, the Daily Beast, and magazines from New York and Ebony to Der Spiegel and VICE. 

His personal work, shot largely in medium-format black-and-white, has been exhibited and collected by the Brooklyn Museum, the Gordon Parks Museum, the International Center of Photography, the Aperture Foundation, the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Goethe Institute in Accra, Ghana. After his first exhibit in East Africa drew attention to his work, UNESCO commissioned him to conduct a series of workshops for young African photographers in Ethiopia and South Sudan. Following on that success, he returned to Addis Ababa in 2015 to organize media capacity building workshop with photojournalists, feature writers and film makers which taught 250 aspiring professionals from across Africa, focusing on the power of photography to portray their own stories and reshape the narratives of Africa and the African diaspora.

Frederick is a proud member and vice president of Kamoinge Inc., the collective of African-American photographers known internationally for documenting the life of the African diaspora over the last 50 years. In the winter of 2015, the collective’s retrospective, Timeless: Photographs by Kamoinge, was published to rave reviews. Among his most prized honors was a pro-tem appointment to the White House press photographers in 2013 for President Barack Obama’s visit to Brooklyn.

His life outside photography includes mentoring at-risk young men with the Kings Against Violence intervention program in Brooklyn. He has been the Men's Program Director since 2011

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