Robert Perkins (artist)

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Robert Perkins (April 19, 1949 – July 21, 2025) was an American artist, filmmaker, and writer from Boston who lived in Utah. He made documentary films for PBS in the United States and Channel Four in the UK since 1987, often focusing on solo canoe journeys in remote wilderness. His One Man's Journey mini-series, including a voyage through the Canadian Arctic, aired on PBS in 2005. He was the first American to travel to the Kamchatka Peninsula after the Soviet Union dissolved, which he documented in Yankee in Kamchatka (1991). He paddled the Limpopo River for The Crocodile River (1993) and the Great Fish River in Northern Canada for Into the Great Solitude (1987) and his 1997 book Talking to Angels. He also explored the Connecticut River for Home Waters (1994) and the lower Colorado River for Blind Bird Singing Rain (2012), which won Best Canoeing Film at the 2013 Reel Paddling Film Festival. His journey from London to Scotland in One Man in a Boat (1993) explored his heritage.

The Written Image is Perkins’s ongoing collaboration with poets, creating intimate portraits with writers including Nobel Laureates Seamus Heaney and Octavio Paz, as well as Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell. He studied at Harvard University and earned an MA from Bennington College in 2004. The Written Image began in Elizabeth Bishop’s creative writing seminar at Harvard after she asked what he was, and she gave him her poem The Fish to illustrate, launching a project that continues today. Perkins’s work has been shown internationally, including at the 2014 Ledbury Poetry Festival and at Benjamin Spademan Rare Books in London.