The executive producer and co-director of "Our Holocaust Vacation," Nicholas Blair was also the principal camera person and editor.
Born in New York City 1956, Nicholas became interested in photography at a young age and studied it both at the progressive Dalton School and St. Anne’s High School in Brooklyn. After traveling extensively in South America and India, he went on to obtain an MFA in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1981 and began a career teaching fine art photography as well as exhibiting and selling prints.
In 1985, he was given the opportunity to photograph and assist a documentary film crew covering the Ethiopian famine for the development agency CARE. That humbling experience and his emerging awareness of the power moving images to influence people inspired a career change from still photography to documentary cinema, which he returned to New York City to persue. After apprenticing for four years, he began working as a director of photography in the late 1980's.
Since that time has traveled to over 50 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America and worked for a multiplicity of organizations including the Peace Corps, UNICEF, the relief and development agency CARE, the National Geographic Society, MTV, Nickelodeon, VH -1, Fox Television, WNET, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Shoa Foundation, the Pearl Lange Dance Foundation, the History Channel, A&E Television, Discovery Television, HBO, and PBS. Although primarily a director of photography, he has produced a number of documentaries, most notably American's Culture of Crash, a 52 minute documentary about the sport of demolition derby which was shown on The Learning Channel in 1997 and won the World Fest Houston Bronze Medal Best Independent Video. Our Holocaust Vacation is his second feature length documentary.
He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1984, the New York Foundation for the Arts in 1990, and the Jerome Foundation 1999. His still photographs are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the International Center for Photography in New York City, The Brooklyn Museum, the Bibliotheque National, Paris France, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Texas. He currently lives with his wife and two children in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.
