FOUNDERS
Steve Liss (Director)
Steve has produced dozens of photographic essays and over forty cover photographs during his twenty-five year career at Time magazine. He is the author of No Place for Children: Voices from Juvenile Detention, which received the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism prize and the Pictures of the Year World Understanding Award. He has been a recipient of the Soros Justice Media Fellowship for his work on juvenile justice and the Alicia Patterson Fellowship for his work on domestic poverty. His commentary on American poverty has been heard on NPR’s All Things Considered, the BBC World Service and CNN. Steve taught graduate photojournalism at Northwestern University and is on the faculty at Columbia College Chicago.
Jon Lowenstein (Deputy Director)
Jon Lowenstein has been a professional photographer for more than ten years specializing in long-term, in-depth projects that confront the realms of power, poverty, and violence. Jon believes images make a critical contribution by revealing the subjects of history that lack voice. He was recently named both a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2011 TED Global Fellow. In 2008 he was named the Joseph P. Albright Fellow by the Alicia Patterson Foundation and also won a 2007 Getty Images Grants for Editorial Photography. He also won a 2007 World Press Award and was named as a USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism Racial Justice Fellowship.
William Diehl (Educational Director)
Will received his Ph.D. in Adult Education from Pennsylvania State University where he focused on theory, practice, and historical foundations of distance education. He is a former K-12 teacher, is currently an instructor at Penn State, and is the interviews editor at The American Journal of Distance Education. Will consults internationally for non profits, academic institutions, and corporations in areas such as faculty development, systems implementation, web design and development, social networking, and virtual worlds. He is also an author and an expert reviewer for the National Institute for Literacy and academic journals.
Mary Studley (Community Outreach)
A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Mary spent the last 16 years as Midwest photo editor for Time magazine where she was responsible for organizing assignments in fifteen states for hundreds of photographers. She has edited and consulted on many books, including Art Shay’s Nelson Algren’s Chicago. Mary currently works full time serving the needs of some of Indianapolis’ most vulnerable children as a Community School Coordinator, developing a wide range of programs and partnerships to serve children and their families.
Bill Healy (Communications Director)
Bill holds a degree in sociology with a concentration in social justice analysis from Georgetown University and master’s degrees in Journalism and in Education from Northwestern University. Bill has taught both elementary school and high school on Chicago’s South Side. He is a contributor to WBEZ-Chicago Public Radio. In 2010 Bill was a Carnegie/Knight News 21 Fellow.
Bobby Bailey
Bobby is a cinematographer and a passionate advocate with a strong track record in youth organizing. He co-founded Invisible Children, which, since 2003, has brought its film and media campaign on behalf of young people in war-torn Uganda to thousands of students across the United States. Bobby is USA co-founder and Creative Director for the Global Poverty Project.
Danny Wilcox Frazier
Danny is an award-winning documentary photographer based in the Midwest. Over the past five years, Danny has photographed people struggling to survive the economic shift that has devastated rural communities across his home state of Iowa. His first major book, Driftless: Photographs from Iowa (Duke University Press, 2007), is based on that work and received the 2007 Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize. Legendary photographer Robert Frank selected Danny’s book for the award. Danny’s work appears regularly in Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report, among others.
Paul Fusco
Paul is a member of the legendary photo agency Magnum. He is also a former Look magazine staffer and author of seven major books. On assignment for Look, Life, Time, Newsweek, the New York Times Magazine and international publications, Paul has produced historic reportage on social issues in the U.S. including destitute miners in Kentucky, Latino ghetto life, runaway youths trying to survive in New York City, African-American life in the Mississippi Delta and migrant laborers. His books include La Causa: The California Grape Strike (Collier, 1970); RFK Funeral Train (Umbrage/Magnum, 2000); and, most recently, Chernobyl Legacy, (de.MO, 2001).
George Giglio
After majoring in theatre at Boston University, George spent several years directing stage and video programs for inner-city youth at Boston’s Federated Dorchester Neighborhood Houses and Alvin Ailey Camp. George’s recent documentary credits include We are the Arapaho People (Director), filmed on location at the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming, and Forgotten Communities (Director), an examination of rural Mississippi and Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Narrated by Danny Glover, Forgotten Communities was comissioned and funded by Oxfam America.
Lori Grinker
Lori is a recipient of the prestigious W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography. She has earned international recognition for her work, garnering a World Press Photo Foundation Prize, the Ernst Hass Grant, the Santa Fe Center for Photography Project Grant and a Hasselblad Foundation Grant. Her photographs have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions around the world. Lori’s most recent book, Afterwar: Veterans from a World in Conflict, was published by de.MO in March of 2005. Between editorial assignments Lori lectures, teaches workshops, and is on the faculty of the International Center of Photography.
Brenda Ann Kenneally
Brenda Ann Kenneally is an independent visual media maker and mother whose long-term projects are intimate portraits of social issues that intersect where the personal is political. Kenneally’s reportage on American families over the past two decades has been recognized and supported by The W. Eugene Smith Fund for Humanistic Photography, The Mother Jones Documentary Fund, The Alicia Patterson Foundation, A Soros Criminal Justice Fellowship and two Nikon Sabbatical Grants. Her book Money, Power, Respect won the Best Photojournalism Book at Pictures of The Year in 2006 and her most recent work, The Upstate Girls Project, was awarded The Cannon Female Photojournalist Award in 2008 and the 2009 World Press photo Award for Daily Life.
Andrew Lichtenstein
Andrew specializes in long-term stories of social concern. His ground-breaking work on American prisons and incarceration has won numerous awards, including the Soros Justice Fellowship from the Open Society Institute, and has appeared in books, newspapers, magazines and exhibits in New York and around the world. His photographic essays have taken him to Haiti, South Africa, and across America, exploring poverty, addiction, the prison-industrial complex and the casualties of war. In his new book, Never Coming Home (Charta 2007), Andrew documents the grief and sacrifice of the families of eight U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq.
Eli Reed
Eli has been a Magnum photographer since 1973 and is a professor of photojournalism at the University of Texas. Eli has worked on assignment for National Geographic,Life, Time, People, Newsweek, the New York Times, among others. He has published two comprehensive books: Beirut, City of Regrets, published in 1988, which delves into the life of residents of Lebanon during the Civil War and Black in America (W.W. Norton, 1997–with a forward by Gordon Parks), which features text and poetry written by Eli. It is widely regarded as the definitive work on the lives of African-Americans from the 1970s to the end of the 20th Century.
Stephen Shames
Steve is author of four monographs: Outside the Dream, Pursuing the Dream, The Black Panthers and Transforming Lives. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the International Center of Photography and The Corcoran Gallery of Art, among many others. Steve started L.E.A.D. Uganda (www.leaduganda.org) which locates forgotten children (AIDS orphans,former child soldiers, and children living in refugee camps) with innate talents and molds them into leaders by sending them to the best schools and colleges.
Manasa Reddy (Director of Youth Action)
Manasa is currently a freshman at New York University. She spent her junior year in high school in Washington, D.C., working for the U.S. Congress as a House of Representatives Page. She recently founded Gracopia, a non-profit organization which will focus on providing educational materials to serve the needs of impoverished children in underresourced public schools. Manasa is extremely interested in social work and plans to pursue a career in social entrepreneurship.
