Gwendolen Cates is an award-winning photographer and filmmaker whose work has screened on PBS, at film festivals, colleges and universities, museums, and the UN. Originally a photographer, her portraits of luminaries from Rosa Parks to George Clooney were featured in national and international magazines including Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and Parade. Her critically acclaimed book Indian Country (Grove Press 2001) inspired Oprah to begin a series on Native Americans. Her documentary films include Water Flowing Together, which chronicles the life of Navajo/Puerto Rican New York City Ballet principal ballet dancer Jock Soto (Independent Lens 2008); The Good Mind (2016) about the Onondaga Nation in NY state, a traditional Indigenous government that follows the Great Law of Peace, fighting for the return of lands stolen by NY state; We Are Unarmed (2020) a fresh look at the peaceful and prayerful resistance at Standing Rock to the DAPL pipeline; and The Doctrine (2026), a film about the Doctrine of Discovery – 15th century papal bulls issued by the Vatican that authorized colonization and the seizure of Indigenous lands, codified white supremacy, racism and slavery, and became international & U.S. law – that follows a group of Indigenous youth in Minneapolis who secured a meeting at the Vatican to advocate for its repudiation. Cates was embedded with the U.S. Army during the 2003 Iraq invasion, and subsequently spent a year total (2008-2011) embedded with Iraqi minority communities while working on a project about Iraqi cultural heritage. She is the daughter of a linguist fluent in Diné Bizaad, the Navajo language, who first brought her to Indian Country as a child. She studied cultural anthropology at the University of Chicago.