Sherri VandenAkker, a committed educator and avid nature photographer, creates the majority of her work close to home, in Eastern Massachusetts and on Cape Cod -- places her family has cherished for generations.

Sherri learned to shoot on film, using her great-uncle's Canon II B and hand-held light meter. Her foundation in traditional photography coupled with the advantages of digital shooting and post-processing have allowed Sherri to create and share her images of birds, butterflies, and other fauna in ways that the preceding generations of photographers in her family who inspired her work could not. She hopes that they would be pleased with how she has honored and furthered their legacy.

As a child, Sherri pored over great aunt’s well-worn copies of John James Audubon’s Birds of America and Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds. As a student, Sherri developed an appreciation for the visual and language arts, particularly the work of local nature poets Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Mary Oliver. Weaving together her appreciation for the natural sciences and the arts, Sherri strives to shoot simultaneously as a natural historian, artist, story-teller, and poet. She captures her subjects in their natural environment – ideally on the wing or when hunting, feeding, and interacting – and utilizes negative space and dramatic lighting to showcase their compelling characteristics and traits. She strives to tell a story or create a tone with her images.

Sherri is a juried member of the Cape Cod Art Center. Sherri has collaborated with visual artists Cynthia Arieta, Alisa Beck, and Trish Taylor Ponappa who have praised her painterly eye. Sherri’s work has been displayed in the exhibit Breeding Birds of the Coast at the Massachusetts Audubon Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary (2016), in the Nature Hall at the Sanctuary, and in numerous Massachusetts Audubon and Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary online publications and features. She has presented at the Click! 2019 conference of the Cape Cod Art Center Camera Club and to the Whaling City Camera Club (2019). She was awarded Honorable Mention in the Mass Audubon Photography Contest (2018). Sherri is a member of the Cape Cod Art Center Camera Club.

Sherri recently received a grant from the Reading Cultural Council and collaborated with the Reading Public Library to assemble and publish the Pandemic Peace and Promise Community Photography Project, a collection of images contributed by town residents documenting their resilience in the early days of the Covid 19 pandemic. (Click here to view the digital collection; here to access a PDF version; and here to purchase a book at cost.)

Sherri is a tenured Professor of Literature, Writing, and Journalism at Springfield College. She is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker (My Name Was Bette: The Life and Death of an Alcoholic) and she produces programming for her local cable television station, RCTV.

Sherri and her husband, Malcolm Coles, live in Reading and in Eastham, Massachusetts, and are the parents of two college-aged children. You can learn more about Sherri by visiting her profile on LinkedIn. You can email her by clicking here.