Ken Light is a part-time instructor at City College of San Francisco. He is also an adjunct Professor and curator of the Center for Photography at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California Berkeley, and has taught workshops at the ICP in New York City, The Missouri Photo Workshop and in the School for Photographic Studies in Prague and Baltimore. He is a founder of the International Fund for Documentary Photography which awarded grants to photographers worldwide, as well as founder of Fotovision.

Light is a social documentary photographer whose work has appeared in books, magazines and exhibitions. His most recent book Coal Hollow (University of California Press) was published in 2005. He has numerous other books to his credit including To Texas Death Row (1997), Delta Time (1995), The Promised Land (Aperatrue 1988) and Witness In Our Time: The Lives of Social Documentary Photographers (2000). His freelance work is represented by Contact Press Images in New York.

He has exhibited internationally in over 175 one-person and group shows, including one person shows at the International Center for Photography, S.E. Museum of Photography and Smith College. His work is part of numerous collections including the San Francisco MOMA, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the International Center of Photography and the American Museum of Art at the Smithsonian. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts Photographers Fellowships, the Dorothea Lange Fellowship and a fellowship from the Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation as well as a grant from the Soros Open Society Institute.