ABOUT SAMMANI PERERA
A journey from storyteller to photographer
For most of the year, she is an educator at Elon University in North Carolina where she teaches first-year writing and travel literature. She is extremely proud of her travel literature class which feels like a virtual tour of different locations around the world through the medium of literature and new media. It is the combination of her deepest passions—travel, photography, and writing.
From 2014 to 2016, Sammani was a graduate student in creative writing (fiction) at Miami University, Ohio, USA. She was working on her Master’s thesis, a collection of short stories straddling island life in Sri Lanka before, during, and after the 2004 Asian Tsunami. When the tsunami waves violated the coastline of Sri Lanka, she was still a teenager growing up in the island. When she wrote about that experience, it was already an event 10 years past and higher education had brought her to the USA. This temporal and spatial distance compelled her to rely heavily on photographic evidence during her writing process. She scrutinized photographs and wove them into stories. She gave the events frozen therein a life of their own with a past, present, and future. Before long, she found herself looking at photographs not only as a muse for writing, but also for their aesthetic and technical aspects.
A few firsts, post-graduation, sealed her new-found interest in photography: a trip to the Olympic National Park, her first national parks experience, with a Canon Rebel T5, her first DSLR camera. Nature was an ever-present part of her life growing up in an island nation, and the Olympic National Park reconnected her with her childhood and home country. Since then, she had roamed many a national parks, embraced camping, hiking, and road tripping, and moved onto a Canon Mark IV. She is enthralled by the color play around sunrises and sunsets, the beasts who with lasting patience share nature with us and put up with our cameras, and the way Native American and pioneer history often intersect with nature. Within the larger category of travel photography, she primarily focuses on the landscape and wildlife in US national parks. She is interested in venturing into aerial and astrophotography in the near future.