Kris Dreessen is an award-winning journalist and photographer and travel addict who specializes in news, documentary and nature and travel journalism. She likes to learn about other cultures and to share the uniqueness we find in exotic places as well as in our own backyards.

She caught the wanderlust when she spent a year in former West Germany when she was 17. She has since traveled to more than 20 countries and around the United States, usually solo and with more film and memory cards than cash. She has lived in Germany, Brazil, Ireland and sunny St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands.

As an outdoors writer, editor and photographer for an upstate New York newspaper chain, her writing earned 11 state newspaper-writing awards.

As an instructor at the Genesee Center for the Arts and Education's Community Darkroom, she introduces students to photojournalism. She is a freelance photographer and the Amazon contributor for the new “Viva Travel Guide: Peru.” Her images and writing have appeared in newspapers, “Women’s Adventure” and other national magazines, tattoo publications, Native American journals, travel guides and the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film.

In 2006, she created The Friends Project to give back for all the inspiration she has received while on the road. The grassroots travel charity funds small improvement projects in developing countries, such as the installation of window screens and provision of bleach tablets and buckets to teach residents how to sanitize drinking water in the remote community of Nueva Esperanza in the Peruvian Amazon.

Most recently, The Friends Project helped to raise more than $11,000 to build the first school in Las Minitas, a mountain community near El Sauce, Nicaragua, who lobbied the government for a permanent elementary teacher. Kids were walking up to an hour and a half to attend classes. The project has also helped an eco-tourism cooperative in El Sauce, Nicaragua build a well, and provided women artisans of El Sauce the opportunity to complete an intensive training program so they can create intricate and colorful baskets made from pine needles they collect near their mountain homes. They now fetch higher prices for them in tourism markets and have reached small U.S. markets. Income helps them support their families. The Friends Project is also building a school in El Sauce with other volunteers, to open in February 2012.

Find out more about The Friends Project work and most recent photo initiative in El Sauce on her blog at —blogs.bootsnall.com/friends-project.

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