Jaki Shotridge Gerulskis

Photographer · Co-Founder, Lisbon Street Photo Fest

Jaki Shotridge Gerulskis is a Lisbon-based portrait, travel and street photographer. His images are recognizable for their bold contrasts, graphic color washes, and single figures pulled from the crowd. He finds the accidental renaissance in the everyday.

His mother, Jeanne Gerulskis, spent her career as Executive Director of the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, a planetarium and air and space museum, shaping how people encounter and understand the universe. She's been putting lenses in Jaki's hands since childhood. It stuck.

Jaki is Tlingit on his father's side, from a family defined by the preservation of indigenous experience. His father, Israel Shotridge, was one of Alaska's most celebrated master carvers, whose totem poles stand in parks and federal buildings across the country. His grandmother Esther Shea spent her life revitalizing the Tlingit language after the residential schools' attempted eradication. Jaki views his own work through the same lens — an indigenous person far from home, documenting what he sees.

Now based in Lisbon, Jaki is Co-Founder & Vice President of Lisbon Street Photo Fest, an annual street photography festival that brings photographers from around the world together for exhibitions, workshops, talks, and photowalks.