William Frej Author

Anne Frej is an urban planner who has focused on feasibility studies and design concepts for real estate projects in the United States, Indonesia, Central Europe, and Central Asia. At the Urban Land Institute in Washington, D.C., she directed books on real estate development, and at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, she served as a cultural resources planner. William Frej has been photographing Indigenous people for more than forty years while living in Indonesia, Poland, Kazakhstan, and Afghanistan as a career diplomat with the United States Agency for International Development and traveling in other remote, mountainous regions of Asia. His book of black-and-white photographs, Maya Ruins Revisited: In the Footsteps of Teobert Maler (2020), has won fourteen awards. His second book, Seasons of Ceremonies: Rites and Rituals in Guatemala and Mexico (2021), has won eight awards including four “photography book of the year” awards. Travels Across the Roof of the World: A Himalayan Memoir (2022) features color photographs by William Frej and text by Anne Frej. Edwin Bernbaum, Ph.D., is a lecturer, author, and scholar of comparative religion and mythology whose work focuses on the relationship between culture and the environment. He is the author of The Way to Shambala (1989), a study of Tibetan myths and legends of hidden valleys and their symbolism. His acclaimed book, Sacred Mountains of the World, was originally published in 1990; the second edition was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.