Education opens up many doors, even in the face of hardship.

Such is the case of RaMell Ross, a guard from Fairfax, VA who lost portions of two seasons to injuries, and yet discovered a career far from basketball in the process.

As a junior at Lake Braddock HS, Ross averaged 20 points a game, earning all-district honors and an honorable mention by the McDonald's All-American committee. Ross would have been a national recruit under most circumstances, but a shoulder injury forced him to miss his entire season, of which he was lightly recruited as a result.

Ross joined the Hoyas in 2000, seeing action in 12 games as a freshman with a seven point season high versus Howard. An off season foot injury cost him the entire 2001-02 season while a recurrence of his shoulder problems cost him all but one game in 2003-04. As a fifth year senior, he saw action in 20 games, with a pair of nine point games early in the season as career highs.

Pursuing an minor in fine arts, Ross signed up for a photography course. It changed his life.

"People have tried to dissuade me from pursuing a career in photography," Ross said in a 2009 article. "Some have even laughed when I told them what I obsessively do and think about. But there is something so attractive about the craft, something so invigorating surrounding the process, that I wonder how much of it is a choice."

Following graduation from the College, Ross played basketball in Northern Ireland and worked as a program manager for a DC-based non-profit, Peace Players International, before turning full time to photography in 2007. He enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design, earning a MFA in photography and honing his craft for a series of exhibitions which has taken his work to New York, London, and Copenhagen, and across the pages of the New York Times, Business Week, and ESPN.

"In 2007 I could not get enough of photography," he said. "There was a veil slowly lifting, revealing the horizon-less landscape beyond photography's ability to freeze moments and portray beauty. The true potential of photography had begun to resonate with me and I finally recognized that my work was limited only by my creativity."

Ross has created both photography and film works focusing on Hale County, Alabama, a hard scrabble portion of rural Alabama known as the "Black Belt". The population has dropped by half over the last century. Ross not only covered the area at a distance, he moved to the area for two years to experience it first hand. His documentary, "Hale County This Morning, This Evening", won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Creative Vision at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award in 2019.

Where Ross once funded projects on Kickstarter, he has since been the recipient of grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Sundance Institute. In 2015, he was a guest lecturer at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, and was an artist in residence at MIT.

Ross is currently a Mellon Gateway Fellow and an assistant professor at Brown University.