Martha Cooper knew she would be a photographer from the time she was a child and received her first Kodak Brownie camera. In the ensuing years, Martha's love of travel and fascination with the local cultures have enabled her to create a body of work depicting the lives and routines of people from a variety of places throughout the world. Her photographs have appeared in National Geographic, Smithsonian and Natural History Magazines as well as several dozen books and journals. She is the Director of Photography at CityLore, the New York Center for Urban Folk Culture.

For over thirty years she has captured the joyful spirit and inventiveness of children from the rain forest in South America to the mountains of Afghanistan to the inner cities of the US.