Brenda Ann Kenneally is a mother, multi platform documentary maker, Guggenheim Fellow, Pulitzer Prize Nominee, and formerly incarcerated youth. Over the past thirty years Kenneally’s long form, immersive projects have at once, produced visceral portraits of the personal experiences of disadvantaged children in America, and a ground up historic record of contemporary social and political values in The United States. Kenneally’s professional bio states ” I take pictures to remember what I’ve learned while I was busy taking pictures”. It was Kenneally’s need to share what she had learned from both her own childhood in Upstate New York and the twelve years that she spent recording the history of an extended family of young people as they came of age in post industrial Troy, New York, that lead her to form A Little Creative Class, Inc. Kenneally had been born thirty years earlier and one town over from the young people that she has chronicled in her book “Upstate Girls: Unraveling Collar City, published by Regan Arts, to be released in Spring 2017. Kenneally’s teen years and been strikingly similar to those of the young people that she grew close to through the project. As she witnessed many become further cemented in systems of, special education, juvenile detention, early pregnancy, dead end employment, and frequent crippling social anxiety and depression, she knew from her own experience that it was only her creative path as a photographer that lead her to the essential wider world of possibilities. She also knew, as the first person in her family ever to leave Upstate New York, that a radically expanded thought processes and physical experience had been essential to a life that was socially and economically improved in significant ways. Kenneally’s hopes that A Little Creative Class, Inc. will open up an array of possibilities to a population of young people who didn’t know they existed, and who in many ways stand to benefit from a broader cultural orientation the most. Kenneally received her GED from The State of New York in 1977. In 1994 she graduated with a BS from The University of Miami, where she majored in both Photojournalism and Sociology. In 2000 she went on to earn her MA in Studio Art and Art Education from New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education. Kenneally has been a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and has won several major journalism awards, including, The W. Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography, The Mother Jones Documentary Award, A Soros Criminal Justice Fellowship, and several grants form The New York State Council For The Arts. In 2006, Kenneally abandoned the boundaries between life and work after completing her first decade long project about the Brooklyn neighborhood where she and her son lived. Money, Power, Respect; Pictures of My Neighborhood, was published by Chanel Photographics and was awarded best photojournalism book of that year by The National Press Photographers’ Association.