I'm grateful for the opportunity to witness and register what I see through my images.
Through my life experiences, I seek to gain a deeper understanding of
my individual and our collective purpose in this universe
– one that can ultimately help lead us to a better tomorrow.
I invite you to join me on this journey."
My story
I graduated in Visual Communication from the School of Industrial Design (ESDI) at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. After growing up in Brazil, I married an American and we moved to the Bay Area, California, living there for several years while I was raising my two children. As a graphic designer, my most notable job was to work from 1995 to 1998 as the webmaster for the Rainforest Action Network website in San Francisco; It was a unique experience, being at the early birth of the internet when websites were only built using HTML.
Since a teenager, I have loved to take photos. In 1998, tired of doing websites, I applied for a six months artist-in-residence grant for visual research in the Negev and Sinai Deserts in Israel. My photo series ‘Bedouins: a Way of Life” was exhibited at the Tel Aviv Art Center, the Arad Museum, the Osher Gallery in the Marin J.C.C., Fairfax Library Gallery, and Project Artaud Gallery in San Francisco. Since then, I have continued taking photographs and making videos for CD.s, DVDs, book covers, magazines, and my youtube channel.
In 2001, I spent six months on the banks of the Ganges River to co-produce with Pepe Ozan, the documentary “Ganga Ma, A Pilgrimage to the Source.” Following the holiest pilgrimage of the Hindus, from the Bay of Bengal to the source of the Ganges river, in the Himalayan glaciers. “Ganga Ma” was exhibited at several film festivals and it was the winner of the award for Best Documentary at the Taos Mountain Film Festival, New Mexico in 2006. Since then, I have traveled extensively throughout India, as I have fallen in love with the beauty of the Hindu culture, temples, and people.
In 2003 we returned to India to spend seven months in the Thar Desert of Rajasthan, capturing the images to co-create the documentary “Jaisalmer Ayo: Gateway of the Gypsies.” It became a critically acclaimed study of Rajasthan’s rich nomadic cultures, that premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2004. Awarded Best Documentary at “Video-Fest” in San Francisco. ‘Jaisalmer Ayo’ was showcased in several ethnographic international film festivals, including 2006 “All Roads National Geographic Film Festival” and the 2007 New York Museum of Modern Art: “Documentary Fortnight,” and broadcast on European T.V. channels and in New Zealand.
In “Aphrodesia: Bio-fuel Tour,” we followed with Pepe Ozan, a group of musicians, artists, and eco-engineers traveling across the United States from San Francisco to New York on two buses running on 100% recycled vegetable oil. A voter registration musical tour with Aphrodesia, a San Francisco-based afrobeat band with the mission of bringing awareness to the sustainable energy technology of biofuel-powered transportation. This short documentary was the winner of the 2006 Second Best prize at the Marin County International Festival of Short Film and Video.
In 2007 and 2008, I returned to India to continue the study and visual research of India’s rich nomadic cultures. This time in the area of Hampi in the state of Karnataka with my daughter, aManda Greene. From the material we gathered, two short ethnographic documentaries were edited, one about the “Village life in a Banjara/Lamani Tandra” and the other, “A Day in the life of a Banjara/Lambani .” This beautiful tribal community is known by those two names.
“Never Again”, a short documentary I produced and edited, won Second Place at the 2009 Annual Short Film Awards on the theme “The Holocaust Through a 21st Century Lens”, sponsored by the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum.
In 2010, I completed the twenty-five minutes documentary about the legendary Rainbow Gathering. ‘Warriors of the Rainbow’ features ‘Ram Dass,’ the iconic American spiritual teacher, and other Rainbow family members as they express their love and hope for the future of humankind.
My brother, Beny Tchaicovsky (1954-2009) was an extraordinary and multi-faceted artist. He was a visionary painter, musician, composer and an award-winning pioneer in the field of 3D Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) as an art form. After his passing in 2009, I was determined to keep his artistic legacy alive. I decided to honor his work by creating a coffee table art book, titled “Beyond the Realm of Duality, The Esoteric Realism of Beny Tchaicovsky.” It is now available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble so people can have a glimpse into his incredible work.
One of my latest projects is the publication of the first Children’s book of the series Children from Around the World,” which presents the life of children from under-represented cultures around the planet. This project idea was developed with my daughter aManda Greene before her tragic passage in 2019. Through the child’s voice, we tell the story of one day in their lives. In doing so, we hoped to open the young reader to ways of life different from their own. We reached our goal in our first book titled: “Jyoti, the Girl from Varanasi, India.”
I met Jyoti in 2001 while working on “Ganga Ma” in Varanasi. I was there, waiting for the paths to the source of the river Ganges in the Himalayas Mountains to open so we could go there to shot the source for the documentary. I spent my days walking along the ghats, having Chai, and taking photos of people along the way. During that period, I developed a friendship with a child named Jyoti, who I met every day while she was selling dyias to the pilgrims and tourists on the ghats along the banks of the river. Instead of going to school, she needed to work to help her family. I followed a day in her life with my camera.
After my daughter’s passage, in 2019, in my grief, I felt moved to return to Varanasi. I wanted to offer dyias to the Ganges in aManda’s memory and then look for Jyoti after twenty years. In February of 2022, during Covid, as soon as India opened its border to foreigners, I returned to Varanasi. The only information I had, was Jyoti’s mother’s full name, Nirmala Sahani. (photo of Jyoti’s mother in her stand in 2001)
Momen Das, my Rickshaw driver in Varanasi helped me by asking around in the main Ghat where Jyoti’s mother used to have a stand. He found out that Jyoti’s mother had passed away, but Jyoti’s sister was still working selling religious objects to the pilgrims as her mother did. Jyoti was married with a baby boy. Das set up our meeting at the stand on the ghat. (the video of our meeting twenty years later).
After I re-established a connection with Jyoti, I was introduced to the work of “Asha Deep Vidyashram,“ a k-8 school in Varanasi focused on the education of street children of working parents like Jyoti. To give back to the city of Varanasi and the Hindu culture that has given me so much, and in memory of my daughter who loved children and was an educator, I redesigned the book adding extra pages to include information and photos about the School; then organized to have five hundred books printed in Varanasi to be donated for the school to use in their promotion, keeping all the proceeds from the sales to support their work. In the west, the book is available online on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
This video was shot on April 19, 2022, (The Day of the Indigenous people) in the Indian Reservation of the Brazilian indigenous Pataxøs. In this video, Paje Aktxawa tells the story of how he brought the ritual of drinking Ayahuasca from the Amazonas to his tribe in Bahia and it shows the effort the Pataxó people are making to resist the pressure of outside society to keep their culture alive. Nowadays Barra Velha has a high school with indigenous teachers and bilingual education, teaching Portuguese and their ethnic dialect (Patxohã) valuing their customs, culture, and ethnic identity.
After living in the US for many years , I presently live part-time in Israel close to my son’s family, in Brazil and in India. I am working on the next book of the children’s series about Vitoria, a Brazilian Indian girl from the tribe of the Pataxos in the south of Bahia, Brazil, and a documentary project about the Paje of the tribe. The Pataxós Indian reservation is neighboring the land my daughter bought several years ago. Canto Vida Verde the name aManda gave to the land , with the help of her friends we have plans to build an eco-spiritual retreat sanctuary in her memory. If you would like to get updates on Canto Vida Verde project development, send us your message on the Contact page.
"The more you know yourself
the more clarity there is.
Self-knowledge has no end, you don't come to a conclusion.
It is an endless river"
J. Krishnamurti
