Babak Salari is a documentary photographer and cultural activist. Originally from Iran, he has been living in exile in Canada for the past almost 30 years. He has created several bodies of work exploring the double consciousness of otherness, marginality and diasporic identity. His work is sensitive and probing. Because of his own experience as an outsider, he strongly identifies with his subjects. Their trust and acceptance allows him access to parts of their lives normally hidden to outsiders. His work ranges from social tableaux to portraits of individuals and has taken him to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Jordan, Iraq, Kurdistan, Palestine, Israel, Mexico and Cuba. He has worked with Medicines du Monde using photography as a tool to bear witness to the aftermath of the war in Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq and its daily effects in people's lives particularly the environment, children and women. Babak's many diverse photo documentary projects include: portraits of Iranian exiles living in Canada, a series on the power of women and gay men in a matriarchal community in Mexico and a project on the lived experience of women wearing the hijab (Islamic practice of veiling). His photo documentary of the public practice of queer eroticism in Cuba was described by Tom Waugh, curator, critic and Chairman of the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University as an "unprecedented glimpse of a marginal sexual community in a society about which we probably have many misconceptions-in all its dignity, tenderness, humour, style and diversity as well as the more mundane texture of its everyday life." Educated at Concordia University and Dawson Institute of Photography, Babak has been acclaimed for his high degree of technical and artistic accomplishment. He has worked as an instructor of black and white and documentary photography at Dawson College and his work has been published in magazines and journals, privately collected and exhibited in Canada, USA, Europe and Mexico.