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Ryan Ansin

Founder and Executive Director
Every Person Has a Story

G. Ryan Ansin is a Massachusetts native who became involved in not-for-profit organizations at a very young age. At twelve years old, Ansin joined his first board of directors as a voice to represent the population of the Boys and Girls Club when the BGC of North Central Massachusetts was getting off the ground. The education taken from the BGC as well as other boards propelled Ansin into a career focused on this sector. Photography and video quickly became priorities in elementary school as well as at Lawrence Academy High School and have remained dominant in Ansin’s life.

Before founding Every Person Has a Story, Ansin filmed and photographed for various not-for-profit organizations around the world. At fourteen years old, while on a delegation trip to see the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundations (VVAF) rehabilitation centers throughout Vietnam and Cambodia, he found his calling. The first promotional video he created was called every person has a story, and, thus EPHAS Productions was used as the DBA for Ansin’s business. For eight years following the initial excursion, Ansin worked with Veterans International, VVAF, EPIC Arts, Stay Focused, various Boys and Girls Clubs, Rural Black Women’s Rights Initiative and many others. Along the way, he realized that even though the promotional videos he made were successful in attracting donors to the organizations, there are better ways to do so.

Following an expedited period of matriculation at Emerson College in the creative writing and psychology programs, Ansin now operates on the theory that the perspectives of those who are generally in front of the camera are far more worthy of riddling our publications than those of a paid journalist on a short assignment. The people who are experiencing and impacted by the extreme nature of this world should be the ones who present themselves—not a stranger to the community and circumstance.

Upon shifting the organization’s priorities, the Productions portion of the name was dropped, leaving EPHAS, a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing voice to underserved or overlooked groups through photography and creating cross-cultural communities by sharing vision and imagery from our own individual worlds.