Biography
Virginia Bria has been scuba diving since 1977 and actively taking underwater photographs within a month of her initial scuba certification. After moving to California in 1977, she attended an underwater photography seminar out of curiosity, having studied photography at Pratt Institute, NY and teaching art professionally. The underwater photos of Northern California awed her so that she quickly learned to dive and take her cameras underwater. She started shooting with a 35mm Nikkormat in an Ikelite housing and a single strobe and a Nikonos III and has been upgrading and changing equipment ever since using both Canon and Nikon cameras. Currently, she uses a Nikon Z 8 in a Seacam housing, Nikon 850 in a Nexus housing with dual Sea & Sea strobes.
She has won many awards for her work in the Bonaire Digital Shootout, Northern California Underwater Photographic Society's international and beach dive competitions, LA Underwater Photographic Society, Underwater Images and other competitions. She has also published her images in several nonprofit organization publications, including Coral Reef Alliance Calendar of protected marine locations in the world, "Seed," a publication of UCLA's Center for Tropical Research, the Sea Turtle Restoration Project, and Ocean Geographic as well as been published in Elysium Artists for the Arctic and Elysium Heart of the Coral Triangle books, and most recently the 2023 Antarctica Climate Expedition publications and documentary.
She has worked as a dive master and dive instructor aboard the live-aboard dive boat DON JOSE with Baja Expeditions for several years. She has camped along the Sea of Cortez for 13 years, exploring and diving from Loreto to La Paz. Her photographic adventures have also taken her to numerous locations in Indonesia, Africa, Palau, Norway, Hawaii, Europe, Greece, French Polynesia, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Egypt, Bonaire, Turks & Caicos, Cozumel, Philippines, Thailand, Canada, Galapagos, Cuba, East & South Africa, the Arctic, Antarctica, the Azores and our own Northeast and California coasts, rivers and lakes.
Virginia was club president of the Northern California Underwater Photographic Society in 2001 and currently the Program Coordinator for Speaker Events at Marin Scuba Club. She is also a docent for Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and continues her pursuit of underwater and nature photography as a passion and hobby. When not in the water or exploring nature, Virginia is an investment advisor and President and CEO of Virginia Bria & Associates, an investment company in Marin County, Ca.