A photographer's reflection on using workshops to help incarcerated individuals reclaim their humanity, dignity, and fuller stories beyond their past mistakes through the transformative power of creativity and vulnerability.
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Influential Woman · Photography, Media & Social Impact
Saskia Keeley
Accompagnateur / Documentarian, Saskia Keeley Photography
New York, NY 10024
12Years experience
1Article published
2Awards received
Her Story
About Saskia
Saskia Keeley is an award-winning photojournalist, documentary photographer, and workshop facilitator based in New York who uses photography as a catalyst for social justice, healing, and human connection. As the founder of Saskia Keeley Photography, she has spent more than a decade documenting humanitarian initiatives and marginalized communities across the globe while creating spaces where individuals can share their stories, reclaim their voices, and strengthen their sense of identity.
Guided by the belief that photography has the power to bridge divides, challenge perceptions, and reveal our shared humanity, Keeley developed the Accompagnateur Workshops—participatory photography programs that help individuals process lived experiences, build confidence, and imagine new possibilities for their futures. Through these workshops, she has facilitated dialogue between Israeli and Palestinian women, supported incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals through reentry initiatives, and partnered with vulnerable communities facing social and economic hardship. In March 2026, she led her most recent workshop in Nairobi's Kibera settlement, empowering young single mothers through photography, storytelling, and creative self-expression.
Keeley's approach is rooted in empathy, deep listening, and mutual respect, empowering participants to use photography and storytelling as tools for healing, dignity, resilience, and personal transformation. Blending artistic practice with peacebuilding and restorative justice principles, she creates experiences that foster understanding, strengthen relationships, and inspire lasting change.
Her interdisciplinary background spans humanitarian photography, counseling, and transformational leadership. She holds a Master of Arts in Transformational Leadership from Eastern Mennonite University's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. Through collaborations with organizations advancing health, education, peacebuilding, and community development, Saskia Keeley continues to cultivate dialogue, promote empowerment, and build meaningful connections across cultures and communities.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Saskia
01What do you attribute your success to?
I believe the success of my work comes from my ability to create a sense of openness, trust, and connection. I meet and support each participant where they need to be met and seen. I bring experience, presence, and a genuine care for the people I work with. By recognizing each person's individuality, humanity, and vulnerability, participants feel genuinely seen and valued, and trust develops quickly.
Within that environment, photography becomes a powerful tool for empowerment, dialogue, and personal transformation—not simply a creative activity. From the very first session, the camera becomes an entry point into self-exploration. Through making portraits of one another, participants begin the practice of truly seeing themselves and others. Many soon realize that photography in the context of these programs is the vehicle that opens the door to deeper reflection and discovery.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The most influential advice I have received wasn't really career advice. During my counseling training, we were taught that a counselor should not give advice. Instead, the role is to listen deeply, hold space, and walk alongside another person at their own pace.
That teaching felt incredibly empowering and liberating, and it has shaped everything I do. I have carried it into all of my workshops. My role is not to tell participants what to see or how to change, but to accompany them as they discover their own way.
That is also why I named my work Accompagnateur Workshops. In French, accompagnateur means "one who accompanies." It reflects the philosophy at the heart of my practice.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
My work is such a small niche that I'm not sure I can offer industry-specific advice. What I would say is this: be open and receptive, and don't be afraid to be yourself.
Recognizing and, when it feels right, acknowledging your own humanity and vulnerability can be a real strength. I've found that being a person before being a facilitator creates the conditions for trust and genuine connection. People don't need someone who has all the answers—they need someone who is present, authentic, and willing to walk alongside them.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
This is actually an exciting time for my work. There is a growing understanding of trauma-informed practice and of the role that the arts can play in healing, connection, and empowerment. As a result, there is more interest in my workshops than ever before.
The challenge is turning that interest into reality. The organizations and institutions I work with are often focused on meeting their communities' most immediate needs. Even when they see the value of this work, finding the time, resources, and funding to make it happen can be difficult.
Funding is by far the biggest challenge. The organizations that invite me to work with them usually have very limited budgets. They often find creative ways to make the workshops possible once they experience their impact, but it is a stretch. With greater financial support, I could expand the programs, bring in additional professionals to begin to institutionalize this work in order to build something that is sustainable rather than relying so heavily on the generosity of my own community of friends and colleagues.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Integrity, connection, and humility are the values that guide both my work and my personal life.
Her Content Hub
Articles by Saskia
Hard-Earned Wisdom
How Photography Helps Incarcerated Individuals Reclaim Their Full Humanity Beyond Their Mistakes
There is something R said during one of our workshops that I find myself returning to:
"I try to make that little dash between the dates on my tombstone mean something. When you die, it is just your birth date and your death date. That dash is what I try to make meaningful. I used to be the guy putting people in a cell when I was a guard at Rikers Island, and now I am the guy in the cell."
I think about that dash in the context of my photography workshops with incarcerated individuals. For many of these men, that dash—the space between their birth and death dates—has been overshadowed by one chapter of their lives: the mistake they made, the harm they caused, the sentence imposed, and the incarceration that followed. Too often, that becomes the story remembered about them. Their partial story becomes their whole story.
But what I witness in these workshops is the emergence of a fuller story.
A Space to Explore, Reflect, and See—and Be Seen
At the Yaphank Correctional Facility, photography creates a space where the men are invited to step beyond the identities they have had to carry. Many speak about the façade they have learned to maintain—the need to appear tough in order to survive. After years of needing to stay guarded, they often enter this unfamiliar space cautiously, almost gingerly, discovering that vulnerability just might be a source of strength.
The workshop offers a place to explore, reflect, and see—and be seen—in new ways.
R described this transformation:
"With this program, you get a sense that you are free. You get a sense of your own humanity, a sense that you are not an animal locked up in a cage, because you get to explore."
His words capture something essential about this work. The camera becomes more than a tool for creating images; it becomes an invitation to reconnect with curiosity, creativity, dignity, and a sense of self that may have been shelved. In the act of photographing one another, the men begin to see themselves—and each other—differently.
As another man reflected:
"You take two hours of your life and try something new. Guys that were like bumps on a log—and it really brought out something. They metamorphosed."
That transformation is what continues to move me. It is not simply about learning photography. It is about discovering parts of oneself that may have been buried beneath years of survival and judgment.
Hard-Earned Wisdom
What I encounter again and again in these workshops is what I can only describe as hard-earned wisdom. It is not the kind of wisdom that comes from academic study or intellectual circles. It comes from lived experience—through consequences, loss, regret, accountability, reflection, and the courage to grow.
I have been deeply moved by the humanity I have witnessed in these men. Perhaps the word that stands out most is humility—a humility born from an honest understanding of life's complexity and one's own imperfections.
I see resilience.
I see men reclaiming their dignity in a world that often defines them solely by their past.
I see people choosing, one day at a time, to write a different story.
Photography cannot erase what has happened. It cannot change the past. But it can create a moment in which someone is seen in their full humanity—not through the lens of the worst thing they have done, but through the fullness of who they are.
Perhaps that, too, is part of filling in R's dash.
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