Javid Kamali, MD was born and raised in Iran and studied medicine at the University of Vienna, Austria. He completed his residency in internal medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and attended photography classes on the side at Pittsburgh Filmmakers.

He completed his fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine in Albuquerque, NM. While living in Albuquerque, Javid joined a very vibrant and diverse photography community while also expanding his photography vision through multiple workshops with world-class photographers at Santa Fe Workshops. He has lived in Anchorage, Alaska since 2007, working as an ICU physician.

Javid has found that by helping balance his left and right brain, photography has continued to provide a welcome escape from a stressful job in the medical field. “I love to be able to break and create my own rules when I make art because at work I must adhere to very strict rules of medicine,” he says. “I have intentionally tried to separate these two worlds, as in my mind they compete with each other to gain my full attention. In fact, I have tried to suppress each one while I was fully committed to the other.”

Javid’s pandemic photography project, however, is very different from his other works. In this endeavor, he consciously merged the two competing sides of his life to create a project that is both socially relevant and artistically satisfying.

“All of a sudden my two sides became allies,” he says. “My artistic half has become the voice of the physician half who wants to cry out about the devastation that is ongoing behind the doors of the ICU. I hope the product of this merger will change some viewers’ perspectives of the pandemic and, hence, their behavior in relation to it.”