Justus Wayne Thomas is a resident of Nashville and a graduate of Vanderbilt University and the University of Tennessee College of Law. His experience as a photographer began in earnest as an exchange student at the University of Regensburg in West Germany, participating in Vanderbilt's "Junior Year Abroad" program in 1978-79. Thomas brought his parents' Minolta SR-T 201 SLR with him and, upon arrival in Regensburg, found a fully equipped, closet-sized darkroom in his dormitory's basement. The year following his graduation from Vanderbilt, he joined some college friends in Kansas City, where they built a 16’x24’ oar-driven raft, on which they floated down the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans. Thomas brought his Nikon FE and a supply of Ektachrome slide film along on the journey. Thomas' informal photographic education continued as a lab technician at Image Custom Lab in Nashville, a black-and-white custom film and print lab owned and run by a photojournalist who had recently retired from The Nashville Tennessean. Thomas then completed law school and has been a practicing attorney in Nashville for 40 years. With the advent of digital cameras and film scanners, he returned to his creative passion, photography. One of his first projects was to scan the Ektachrome slides he had taken on the raft trip to New Orleans more than three decades earlier and convert them into digital files. This project culminated in the publication of his photobook titled “The River Will Be a Part of Us” (Daylight Books, 2024). Thomas' work, both documentary and fine art photography, has hung in group exhibits in Nashville and in galleries around the country, including The SE Center for Photography, PhotoPlace Gallery, A Smith Gallery, Si Gallery (Dab Art Co., Austin, Texas), Yeiser Art Center (Paducah, Kentucky), Center for Contemporary Art (Abilene, Texas), University of Texas, San Antonio (Fotoseptiembre Festival), and Clara M. Eagle Gallery (Murray State University). He is the current president of the Society of Nashville’s Artistic Photographers (SNAP).