Jeanie Adams-SmitH
For the past seven years Jeanie Adams-Smith has been a professor in the photojournalism department at Western Kentucky University, one of the top college programs in the country. Jeanie is an award-winning photojournalist and has published three books of her photography. Jeanie's multiple awards range from Kentucky Photographer of the Year in 2006 to first place in Pictures of the Year International for a multimedia piece of children of divorce in 2000.
In the past year-and-a-half Jeanie has traveled twice to Cuba, documenting the everyday lives of people in Old Havana. Her work is currently on exhibit in Union Pier, Michigan and Western Kentucky University. The work has won her several regional and national awards. Currently she is working on a book project, The Doorways of Old Havana, which will feature her work from Cuba.
Jeanie has won international awards for her social documentary photographs, including work for Planned Parenthood, Vanderbilt's Burn Unit for children, and projects on brain injury and survivors of rape and sexual assault. One of Jeanie's largest projects documented children coping with divorce. Her book Survivors: Children of Divorce, was nominated by WKU for a Pulitzer Prize entry in non-fiction literature.
Before coming to Western, Jeanie was a photo editor at the Chicago Tribune. Most of her time was spent as the National/Foreign Picture Editor, which included researching and assigning photographs for the national and foreign bureaus and working on many of the Tribune's special projects, including Killing Our Children, a year-long documentary on the children murdered in Chicago in 1993, that won the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Journalism.
Jeanie has been a photo editing coach for the Mountain Workshop, has spoke at national conferences, like Southwestern Photojournalism Conference and she has judged national and regional photo competitions, including POYi , SND and Ohio, Michigan and Indiana State POY contests.
Scott StrazzanTE
Scott Strazzante, 44, was born and raised in the shadows of the steel mills on the far southeast corner of Chicago. The son of a tire dealer, Strazzante first became interested in photography when he started taking his dad’s Canon AE-1 to Chicago White Sox games.
After college, Strazzante began what has now been a 22-year career at Chicago-area newspapers, including The Daily Calumet, the Daily Southtown, and the Joliet Herald-News. In 2000, he was named National Newspaper Photographer of the Year by the National Press Photographers Association and the Missouri School of Journalism.
In 2001, Strazzante started work at the Chicago Tribune where he spends his time as a general assignment photographer.
Strazzante, a six-time Illinois Photographer of the Year, has covered the Super Bowl, the World Series and the last three Olympic Games, but he is more proud of his photo columns- Heart and Soul and The Season- which chronicled the everyday triumphs and struggles of the high school athlete.
Strazzante was recently named Northern Illinois University’s Journalist of the Year, only the 2nd time in 37 years that the award has been bestowed on a photojournalist.
Strazzante was also part of the Chicago Tribune team that won a Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting for a series about faulty government regulation of dangerously defective toys, cribs and car seats.
In 2008, MediaStorm published Common Ground, a multimedia piece on Strazzante’s personal project on the transformation of a piece of land in suburban Chicago from rural to suburban. The 14-year-long project has also been published in the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, Mother Jones and National Geographic.
Strazzante lives in Yorkville, Illinois with his wife Anna and their 4 children.
Ami Vitale
Ami Vitale,
best known for her cultural documentation has been praised as a humane and empathetic storyteller. She has been named Magazine Photographer of the Year and received recognition for her work fromWorld Press Photo, the NPPA, International Photos of the Year, Photo District News. The South Asian Journalists Association presented her with the Daniel Pearl Award for outstanding print reporting on South Asia. Her stories have been awarded grants including the first-ever Inge Morath grant by Magnum Photos, The Canon female photojournalist
award for her work in Kashmir and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace. Vitale's photographs have been published in major international magazines such as National Geographic, Adventure, Geo, Newsweek, Time, Smithsonian and Le Figaro among others. They have also been presented in international exhibitions including: Visa Pour L'Image, Perpignan, France; Reporters Sans Frontiers, Paris; the FotoArt Festival in Poland; the Open Society Institute and The United Nations in New York.
Now based in Washington, DC, Vitale is a contract photographer with National Geographic Adventure and has just finished a project for the Nature Conservancy about threatened environments around the world that will open at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in NY in May 2009. She is also a member of the Executive Advisory Committee of the Alexia Foundation's Board of Directors.
Judging Schedule
National Geographic Grosvenor Auditorium,
1600 M Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20036
Schedule will be posted when available.... judging generally starts at approximately 9 am. All times and categories are subject to change.
