Jeanie Adams-Smith
Western Kentucky University, Associate Professor
Jeanie Adams-Smith is an associate professor in the photojournalism department at Western Kentucky University, one of the top college programs in the country. Her work focuses on social documentary photography and includes projects for Planned Parenthood, Vanderbilt’s Burn Unit for children, and on brain injury and survivors of rape and sexual assault. She has published three books of her photography including “Survivors: Children of Divorce” that was nominated by WKU for a Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction literature. Before joining Western Kentucky, Jeanie was a photo editor at the Chicago Tribune, researching and assigning photographs for the national and foreign bureaus and working on special projects. “Killing Our Children,” a year-long documentary on the children murdered in Chicago in 1993, won the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Journalism. In the past year-and-a-half Jeanie has traveled twice to Cuba, and is currently working on a book project, “The Doorways of Old Havana.”

Ruth Fremson
New York Times, Photojournalist
Ruth Fremson is a photojournalist for The New York Times and a native New Yorker. Ruth’s career path began at Syracuse University when she took a photography course taught by Robert Gilka. After Syracuse, Ruth attended the graduate program at Ohio University, landing an internship at The Washington Times in 1988, followed by her first staff position. In1994 she joined the Associated Press and was assigned to stories in Haiti, Bosnia, the Atlanta Olympics, and the Clinton White House. Ruth was part of the AP’s team to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for their coverage of the Clinton impeachment. Soon after, she was hired by The New York Times — her “home town” newspaper. She has photographed presidential campaigns, the September 11 attacks, the Salt Lake City Olympics, Iraq War, and the Mideast conflict. She has earned numerous awards from the White House News Photographers’ Association, the National Press Photographers Association, the New York Press Photographers Association, and was part of the Pulitzer Prize team for The New York Times in 2001. During the past two years her project work has focused on India where she has made five trips recording the changing and developing nation.

Wen Huang
Xinhua News Agency, Beijing
Wen Huang is with the Xinhua News Agency in Beijing as the senior photo marketing analyst for the News & Information Center. Wen was born in Beijing and studied photojournalism at Renmin University of China in Beijing. She holds a PhD in communication studies and was a Knight Fellow at Stanford University in 2002-2003. Her career began as a picture editor for China's national Xinhua News Agency in 1989 and was based in Germany during the late 1990s. Wen is a former Joop Swart Master Class student, her essay on the Peking opera received honors at the International Journalism Festival of Angers, France. Her book, “Target,” was published in 2000 that focused on the war in Kosovo. Wen has been a jury member for the World Press Photo contest in 2006 and 2007. She was appointed to be an advisor of the National Geographic Society’s “All Roads Photo Project” and member of the Executive Advisory Committee of the Board of Directors of Alexia Foundation in 2007. She is a curator of Pingyao International Photo Festival since 2004 and deputy secretary general of the Organizing Committee of China International Press Photo Contest (CHIPP) since 2005.

Brad Mangin
Freelance Photographer and co-founder of SportsShooter.com
Brad Mangin is a freelance sports photographer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His regular clients include Sports Illustrated and Major League Baseball Photos. After graduating from San Jose State University he worked for several newspapers, including The National Sports Daily before starting to freelance in 1993. Brad has covered several Super Bowls, World Series, NBA Finals games and the Olympics. He regularly photographs spring training in Arizona for Sports Illustrated and the World Series for Major League Baseball. His website (www.manginphotography.com) includes a searchable archive containing more than 18,000 of his pictures. Brad is a founding partner and managing editor of SportsShooter.com, an online community and resource for sports photographers and other working photojournalists.

Sue Brisk
Magnum Photo Agency, Editorial Director
Sue Brisk is editorial director in North America for Magnum Photos. Sue studied at San Francisco Art Institute, receiving a BFA in Photography and a masters in Journalism from Boston University. She began her career working as a freelance photographer, shooting for clients such as Newsweek and Magnum Photos. Sue worked for SIPA Press and operated the agency’s bureau in the United States. In 2001 she joined Magnum Photos in New York, one of the premiere photo agencies that provides photographs to the press, publishers, advertising, television, galleries and museums across the world. She is a board member with the Eugene Smith Fund and has participated as a judge for The Eisenstadt Awards, Overseas Press Club, the Maine Photographic Workshop Golden Light Awards, and Texas Photographic Society’s National Competition, to name a few.

Ruth Eichhorn
GEO Magazine, Director of Photography
Ruth Eichhorn is the director of photography for the German GEO magazines since 1994. She worked out of the New York office for GEO as their bureau chief for five years. Before, she worked for French and American GEO out of Hamburg and for several German magazines as their photo editor. She lived and studied in Paris and was born in Kiel, Germany.

Chris Hondros
Getty Images, Photojournalist
Chris Hondros is a senior staff photographer for Getty Images, and his work frequently is published in the leading newspapers and magazines of the US, Europe, and Asia. Chris studied English literature at North Carolina State and receiving a masters degree at Ohio University. Based in New York, Chris concentrates his work on international reporting and has photographed most of the world’s major conflicts since the late 1990s, including wars in Kosovo, Angola, Sierra Leone, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Kashmir, the West Bank, Iraq, and Liberia. His work has been honored by World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, the Visa Pour L’Image in France, and the John Faber award from the Overseas Press Club. In 2004, Chris was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in spot news photography for his work in Liberia, and in 2006 he won the Robert Capa Gold Medal, war photography’s highest honor, for his work in Iraq. He’s also been named a 2007 “Hero of Photography” by American Photo magazine. In addition to his photography, Hondros is a frequent essayist on issues of war for the Virginia Quarterly Review, Editor and Publisher, The Digital Journalist, and other publications.

Brenda Ann Kenneally
Photojournalist
Brenda Ann Kenneally is a freelance documentary photographer and filmmaker based in New York. Originally from Albany, Brenda openly recounts of her life as a turbulent youth living “in juvenile shelters and group home settings for adolescents that were deemed ‘uncontrollable’ by the courts.” In 1977, Brenda moved to Florida and started taking classes at Broward Community College and graduated from the University of Miami with a double major in Photo Communication and Sociology in 1991. While in Miami, she became a regular contributor to the Miami Herald’s Sunday magazine, Tropic. Brenda later attended the graduate program in studio art at New York University in conjunction with the International Center of Photography. She began photographing the women from the Bushwick and Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhoods, known for poverty and drug trade. She documented the neighborhood for seven years, and portions of the project were published by The New York Times Magazine in 2001. The project culminated in the book; “Money, Power, Respect; Pictures of My Neighborhood,” which was published by Channel Photographics in 2005. The work won first place in 2006 Pictures of the Year International in the Best Photography Book division. During that project, Brenda began gathering audio and started experimenting with multiple formats of media. Her current project, “Upstate Girls,” chronicles the lives of six teenaged women in Troy, NY. This project earned Brenda the Community Awareness Award in the 63rd POYi competition. In 2006, she produced a documentary film titled, “Hip Hop by All Means Necessary,” about several Brooklyn rap artists who blur the line between street credibility and commercial success. Her most recent published work was commissioned by The New York Times Magazine to document the legacy of Hurricane Katrina through the lives of children.

Keith Graham
University of Montana, Associate Professor
Keith Graham is an associate professor and director of the Photojournalism/Multimedia Program at the University of Montana. Keith studied English and history at Vanderbilt University before studying theology and philosophy abroad in Switzerland. He completed a masters degree in photojournalism at the University of Missouri under the tutelage of Angus McDougall, and then joined the photography staff at the Miami Herald. Keith then served as a graphics editor and staff photographer at the San Jose Mercury News and as director of photography at The Roanoke Times. Keith’s photographs have appeared in Time, Newsweek, Life, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Sporting News, Paris Match, Stern, the New York Times, The Washington Post and other U.S. newspapers. He now teaches classes in photojournalism and multimedia, plus a publications design class that focuses on newspaper, magazine and Web design. The school was awarded a grant to teach an innovative project called the Rural News Network, where students go to small Montana towns that have lost their newspaper, or never had one, and start an online publication. The goal is to get the community involved in the publication, thus taking ownership and becoming regular contributors to the site. Students are journalists, designers, managers, editors and mentors. Keith is currently working on a documentary project about the lives of multigenerational family ranches in Montana.

Michele McDonald
Boston Globe, Photojournalist
Michele McDonald is a photojournalist for The Boston Globe. She has been a photojournalist for 25 years and began her career at The Eagle-Times in Claremont, NH. She has also worked as a staff photographer for the Concord Monitor and the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, VA, and then joined The Boston Globe in 1989. She was a Nieman fellow at Harvard University in 1988, and a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, in Peterborough, NH, in 1995. In 1997, McDonald was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her photo essay on a young woman preparing for her death, in hospice care at home, from breast cancer. She has covered stories ranging from the high black infant mortality rate in Boston in 1991, to the effects of the war in Yugoslavia on the ordinary people of Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo in 1994. In 2003, when the Globe published a worldwide project on lives lost because of lack of basic health care, Michele photographed in Cambodia and in rural West Virginia, for the project.

Robert Hood
MSNBC.com, Director of Multimedia
Robert Hood is the multimedia director at MSNBC.com. Robert grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. He began his career in photography by “wasting precious time” as he filled up his schedule with photo classes and rode the late bus home from school almost every day. Robert attended and was an instructor in the University of Missouri photojournalism program from 1993 to 1996. He also worked as a daily newspaper photographer in Wyoming and Utah. His first internship was with Parade magazine where he assisted Eddie Adams during the summer of 1987. He started with MSNBC in 1996 and has worked in several capacities within that multimedia team. Those jobs include photographer, picture editor, video shooter and editor, special projects coordinator and senior multimedia producer.