Photographer: Annie Griffiths Belt

Born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, National Geographic photographer Annie Griffiths Belt earned her B.A. in photojournalism from the University of Minnesota. Her professional career began while she was still in school, working as a staff photographer for the Minnesota Daily.

After graduating in 1976, Belt joined the staff of the award-winning Worthington Daily Globe in southern Minnesota. She began assignment work for the National Geographic Society in 1978. Since then, she has worked on dozens of magazine and book projects for National Geographic, including National Geographic magazine stories on Lawrence of Arabia, Baja California, Israel's Galilee, Petra, Vancouver, England's Lake District, and Jerusalem. She has worked on assignments in the Middle East, North America, and the Pacific and creates an annual photographic calendar for Habitat for Humanity.

Belt's work has also appeared in Life, GEO, Smithsonian, Fortune, American Photo, Merian, Stern, and many other publications. Book projects include the A Day in the Life series, Baseball in America, The Power to Heal, Women In the Material World, and One Digital Day.

She has received awards from the National Press Photographers Association, the Associated Press, the National Organization for Women, and the White House News Photographers Association. A grant from National Geographic Society's Expeditions Council enabled her and author Barbara Kingsolver to produce Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands, a book celebrating America's last wild places. Her photographs have been exhibited in New York; Washington, D.C.; Moscow; and Tokyo.

In addition to her photography, Belt has served as photo editor for several book projects. She lectures and teaches workshops regularly, served as visiting professor of photography at Ohio University in 1986-87, and was a featured speaker at the National Press Photographers Association's Flying Short Course in the fall of 1991. She has also been featured in a public television documentary about her work while on assignment in Israel.