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.
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.
Dr. Michael E. Smith is Professor of Archaeology in the School of Human Evolution & Social Change at Arizona State University (ASU) and affiliated faculty at ASU’s School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning. He has two major research themes: (1) Archaeological research: Smith is currently Director of the ASU Teotihuacan Research Laboratory in Mexico. He has excavated at numerous Aztec provincial sites in Mexico, addressing provincial life, economics, inequality, and urbanism. (2 ) Comparative urbanism: Smith participates in several innovative transdisciplinary research projects on topics of comparative urbanism, neighborhoods, and urban sustainability. Smith is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has published eleven books and more than 100 articles on his research. His book, At Home With the Aztecs: An Archaeologist Uncovers Their Daily Life (Routledge, 2016), won the Best Popular Book award from the Society for American Archaeology. His most recent book is Urban Life in the Distant Past: The Prehistory of Energized Crowding (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
