Marie Therese De Belder develops and leads teen workshops internationally in Visual Storytelling. She has taught in the US, Haiti and Papua New Guinea in collaboration with schools and institutions.

Together with Dr. Catherine Levy, who holds a PHD in Linguistics, she founded Words to See the World, a platform at the intersection of linguistic, environmental and cultural conservation for indigenous youth to present the way they view the world through language and photography.

The photographs featured on this page were made by the youth participants during the pilot program of Words to See the World, which was conducted in Awar village in Papua New Guinea in 2018. The theme of the workshop “Trees in Awar culture” was determined during a consultation session with the leadership of the community.

After receiving photography instruction, groups of young people visited the elders of the community and gathered stories around the trees. The participants used visual storytelling to translate the knowledge of the elders into a series of photos. The photos and the stories in the tribal language were exhibited in 2019 in Awar and encouraged conversations around the conservation of the local language, the culture and the natural environment.

A separate website for this project is coming soon.