Carolyn Jones

Through her diverse career and life experiences, Carolyn Jones has found a home using her ability to work with people to help raise awareness for social issues that she feels strongly about. Whether for television, a book, or a documentary film, Carolyn hopes to bring to each a passion for inspiring people to understand and find their own way to help.

To better understand AIDS, motherhood and teenagers she gathered up her camera and tape recorder and traveled to meet people to find answers. In her words: “We can learn so much from hearing each other’s stories. We each have value as human beings and we are infinitely interesting in our ways of dealing with life’s challenges. I've always wanted to celebrate the positive, tell stories of the optimistic, and show us for the best of who we can be. I like talking to people about life, not necessarily famous or privileged people, but people getting through the days with kindness. I find great richness there and I am endlessly fascinated by what we can learn from one another. My work is about people who have changed, overcome a hardship, or risen to great personal heights. It's the underlying stories that I want to tell -- who helped along the way, why someone made certain choices.”

Known internationally for her socially pro-active medium-format photographic portraiture, Jones has worked in a wide variety of film and video formats, primarily in documentary production.

Most recently, Carolyn traveled the world for Microsoft to celebrate IT heroes around the globe – people that make everything work and improve the lives of others. This project, Heroes Happen Here produced a book of her photographs and a series of short documentaries that were created to open the Microsoft launch in 2008.

As a founder of 100 People: A World Portrait Carolyn travels the world to visit schools. She’s talked to students in China, the Philippines, Africa, and here in the US, about world statistics and what we have in common with one another, using photography as a universal language. Information regarding that project can be found at www.100people.org.

Collaboration with Oxygen Media produced Womenshands, a series of documentary films of women artisans from around the world and broadcast for Oxygen’s cable network. Additionally, she produced and directed Women...On Family, a one-hour special that aired on Public Television on Mothers Day, 1993. In 2000, Avon selected her to direct four short documentary films called Women of Enterprise, celebrating the lives of remarkable American businesswomen.

Jones’ most widely acclaimed work, Living Proof: Courage in the Face of AIDS was published in 1994 by Abbeville Press. A series of portraits of American people living with AIDS, the book was accompanied by a traveling exhibition of the portraits that included shows in Tokyo, Berlin, USA, and the United Nations during the World AIDS Conference. A documentary film inspired by the book screened as part of a MTV World AIDS Day broadcast. She also earned much praise for her portraits of American mothers and daughters, published in the book A Family of Women: Voices across Generations (1996) by Abbeville Press.

In March 2002 she collaborated with The Girl Scouts of the USA to create Every Girl Tells a Story: A Celebration of Girls Speaking Their Minds, a book of portraits and interviews of 85 American Girls published by Simon & Schuster. The book was released in Washington D.C. during Women's history month at the National Building Museum.

She lives in New York with her husband and 14-year-old daughter.