Cillín Perera

Early life

Perera was born in London to an Irish mother and a Sri Lankan father, and grew up in Melbourne, Australia. In 1994 he won the Young Achievement Australia "Young Victorian Business Person of the Year" award. In 1995, he went to the United States to study visual arts and cinema at Harvard University.

As a freshman, he started a non-profit company and a late-night show, Wide Awake with Cillin Perera. In 1997, Perera was assistant director of The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase, an experimental documentary that won several festival awards.

Perera became self-employed at the age of 24. Three years later, he founded Language Direct, an online language teaching company. As he started traveling extensively for work, Perrera began to take photographs as a way to express the nomadic lifestyle of the modern CEO.

Homeless CEO

In July 2013, Perera started the "Homeless CEO" project, where he uploads a picture of every flight and of each day to Instagram. Not spending more than four or five days in any one place, Perera took 168 flights and traveled more than 200 thousand miles in 2014.

As of February 2016, Perera has published more than a thousand images from dozens of countries and hundreds of flights, and has amassed no less than 850,000 likes on his Instagram account.

Subjects

Perera's style puts a strong emphasis on composition and perspective. For flights, Perera frequently shoots the view from the passenger window; the project contains possibly the world's largest collection of "airplane porthole" shots. His other photographs show "haunting images of architecture, landscapes and urban settings mostly devoid of the human form."

The actual reason for his frequent choice of desolate landscapes and architecture for his daily photos is partly practical: since Perera has been publishing a photo of the day every day while maintaining a full-time job and a busy travel schedule, he needed subjects that are easy to produce consistently. He very rarely features people in his photos unless they contribute to the composition of the shot.

Another factor influencing his choice of subjects are the technical capabilities of the iPod Touch camera. Since the camera has a near vanishing point, Perera has preferred perspective shots.

Technology

The specific conditions of the Homeless CEO project required a particular choice of technology. Perera chose not to use an SLR or even an iPhone, but to carry a Nokia dual SIM phone which runs for two weeks on a single charge, and to combine it with an iPod Touch with Wi-Fi. For airplane window shots, he uses the wide-angle olloclip lens, which allows him to sit in the window seat and get a full frame.

In general, Perera takes approximately 150 photos per day (most of them different versions of the same scene), but always uploads just one "pic of the day" plus a photo of every flight. He edits using only the Instagram app, but does not use any preset Instagram filters. Each photo is published less than 24 hours after being taken.

Business activities

Perera is the founder and CEO of Switzerland-based Language Direct, an online language teaching company, and UAE-based Avilinga, a company offering translation solutions for the aviation industry. These companies have around 350 remote-working freelancers and clients on 5 continents.

Established in 2004, Language Direct teaches more than 40 languages and boasts partnerships with 15 airline frequent flyer programmes. Established in 2010, Avilinga has clients including Etihad Airways, Qatar Airways, Gulf Air, Hong Kong Express, Pegasus Airlines, Royal Jordanian Airlines and SriLankan Airlines.

Exhibitions

In July 2015, Perera had his debut solo exhibition, HomelessCEO, in Dreamspace Gallery in London.

He offers all of his Instagram-published photographs for sale in a limited edition of 1, plus artist's proof. Instead of a set price, each photo is priced at £1 per "like" on Instagram, as determined at time of sale. Photographs are printed at 40x40cm and are of a much higher resolution than the images available on Instagram. All proceeds go to the Perera Foundation for the Visual Arts, which is being developed by Perera to support emerging visual artists.

Perera's past and scheduled exhibitions:

Private life

Before embracing a nomadic lifestyle, Perera lived in Germany and Switzerland, where he had an apartment in Basel. He has Australian, British and Irish passports.

He became an official resident of the UAE in 2012. His partner currently lives in Turin.

He has collections of classic British cars (including Rolls Royce and Lotus), and indigenous Australian art.