By Stephen Weir

Jenny Baboolal was born in Trinidad and is an entrepreneur, administrator, and practitioner in the arts.

Photography has long been a passion for Jenny and she has been pointing her lens at the Children’s Carnival and the natural environment for decades. Being able to capture anything she finds interesting or beautiful, and share the infinitely wonderful world with others, keeps her love of photography alive. Jenny’s photographic exhibitions include solo shows at the Trinidad and Tobago National Museum, Toronto’s City Hall and Harbourfront. She has also exhibited in group shows at the Royal Ontario Museum and with The Canadian Caribbean Photographers Arts Collective.

As a teacher, Jenny fell in love with educating children and went on to work in arts administration as a program coordinator for the Inner City Angels Children’s Art Centre – Canada’s first. The organization employed over 70 artists with programs in almost all Toronto’s inner city schools.

She later co-founded an independent film company producing short films about children’s art and the Children’s Carnival of Trinidad and Tobago. Jenny has produced documentaries about organizations and people she sees as inspirational, including an hour long documentary about the Inner City Angels. The film highlights the importance of art in education and to society. Her belief is that art experiences are critical to our wellbeing as they broaden horizons, inspire creativity and innovation, invoke pleasure, and take people on journeys of the imagination.

In 1980, she was a co-founder and president for 16 years of one of the first high resolution computer graphics companies in Canada, producing and imaging graphics for presentations for mainly Fortune 500 companies and selling computer graphics equipment. It was a pioneer in the industry.

Jenny’s entrepreneurial spirit has led her to a variety of endeavours including producing two CDs of nature sounds, one of which was given to President Barack Obama and another to Nelson Mandela as gifts from the president of Trinidad and Tobago.

As part of her environmental activism, Jenny produced a prototype carnival band of masqueraders called Going Green, incorporating traditional mas characters in green costumes.

Over the years she has been writing articles published in Trinidad and Tobago and Toronto’s Caribbean newspapers.

Jenny continues to work on various projects in the arts, photography and the environment while promoting the idea of responsibility we all have to each other and to the planet.