Jodi Cobb is a staff photographer for National Geographic and has worked in more than fifty countries, specializing in the Middle East and Asia. She was one of the first photographers to cross China when it reopened to the West, traveling seven thousand miles in two months for the book Journey Into China. She has covered Israel during Palestinian uprisings on the West Bank. And, as one of the few westerners to ever enter the closed world of the women of Saudi Arabia, she photographed in the palaces of princesses and the tents of bedouin for a landmark article in 1987. Cobb entered another world closed to outsiders, the geisha of Japan, for the book Geisha: The Life, the Voices, the Art, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1995. Her most recent articles for National Geographic magazine were "The Enigma of Beauty" and "London." continue