David Helfer Wells

David Helfer Wells is an award-winning visual storyteller, who worked initially as a newspaper photographer, then as a freelance magazine photographer, and most recently as a film-maker. For three decades he worked as a photographer where his still imagery appearing in Fortune, Life, National Geographic, Newsweek, The Sunday New York Times, and Time magazine, among other publications. The Philadelphia Inquirer nominated his work on the pesticide poisoning of California farm workers for a Pulitzer Prize. Many of his films have been juried into film festivals around the globe, including Ankara, Bangalore, Jaipur, Lahore, Lisbon, Mumbai, New Haven, New York City, Philadelphia, Princeton, Providence, Rome, Russia, Sacramento, San Francisco and Tunisia. He has been honored with the Necati Celik Prize from the Hak-Is International Short Film Festival, the award for Best Short Film from the Melrose Film Festival and the Best New England Documentary Short from the South East New England Film Festival. David has a lifelong love of the ocean and coastal communities having grown up in Southern California and living for the past 20 years in Rhode Island, where he is a Senior Fellow of the Coastal Institute of the University of Rhode Island.