Dennis Dimick

Dennis Dimick has been a journalist for more than 40 years. He has worked as a newspaper photographer and reporter at newspapers in the Pacific Northwest, and from 1978-80 was a picture editor at the Louisville Courier-Journal. For 35 years he was a picture editor at the National Geographic Society, serving as the magazine’s environment editor for a decade.

Dennis has been on faculty at the Missouri Photo Workshop for 24 years, and in 2013 he received the NPPA’s Charles M. Sprague Award for service to photojournalism. A former board member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, he has team-taught environmental and science journalism since 2018 at the University of Oregon with UO journalism professor and fellow MPW faculty member Torsten Kjellstrand.

Melissa Farlow

Melissa Farlow has worked extensively for National Geographic magazine in the American West for stories on public lands, environmental issues and wild horses. Primarily known for her personal approach when photographing people, Farlow documented diverse cultures and landscapes while in South America, Quebec, Alaska, the Alps and the Okefenokee Swamp in over 20 National Geographic projects.

Awarded a Pulitzer Prize with the staff of the Louisville Courier-Journal, Farlow received a National Headliner Award as well as Pictures of the Year portfolio honors while at the Pittsburgh Press. Named Distinguished Alumni by the IU School of Journalism, she was inducted into Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame in 2013.

In addition to projects for the Heinz Endowments, the Ford Foundation and Habitat for Humanity, her work is published in Smithsonian, GEO, LIFE, American Craft, American Bungalow, National Geographic Traveler and Sierra magazines. Farlow received a master's degree in journalism while teaching at the University of Missouri. She teaches workshops and is a frequent lecturer as well as a photography consultant with thephotosociety. She and her husband, Randy Olson, a longtime National Geographic contributing photographer, live in Pennsylvania and Oregon.

Becky Lebowitz Hanger

Becky Lebowitz Hanger is the operations manager and photographers' chief at The New York Times. Her work has been honored at Pictures of the Year International, and she was photo editor for Josh Haner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning project after the Boston Marathon bombing. She’s been involved in the online visual innovations for which the NYT is famous since joining the staff in 2004.

Becky earned her master's degree from the University of Missouri after conducting her masters project at the Hartford Courant, where she researched and watched how photo editors work. She later worked as a photo editor at The Palm Beach Post under the guidance of the late, great photo editor Mark Edelson.

This is Becky’s third MPW as faculty. However, she did crew MPW50 in Boonville in 1998. Her job that year was scanning negatives.

Kim Komenich

Kim Komenich heads the photojournalism sequence in the Department of Journalism at San Francisco State University. In 2016 he published “Revolution Revisited: A Look Back at the 1986 Philippine People Power Revolution,” which is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning images he took for the San Francisco Examiner.

After graduating from San Jose State University in 1979, Komenich worked as a staff photographer for the Contra Costa Times. He went on to work as a photographer and editor for the San Francisco Examiner (1982-2000) and the San Francisco Chronicle (2000-2009). Komenich has photographed the ramifications of conflict in the Philippines, Vietnam, Guyana, El Salvador, the former Soviet Union and Iraq, where photos from his three trips to the Sunni Triangle in 2005 earned him the Military Reporters and Editors’ Association’s 2006 Photography Award.

He is a recipient of the national Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, the 1983 World Press Photo News Picture Story Award and three National Headliner Awards. He is a 2005 recipient of the National Press Photographers Association’s Clifton C. Edom Education Award, and the 2010 recipient of the NPPA Humanitarian Award.

He was a 1993-94 John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford and a fall 2001 teaching fellow at the Center for Documentary Studies at U.C. Berkeley. In 2006 he was named a Dart Ochberg Fellow, working with the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University, curating photo exhibitions and giving presentations to journalists about the human toll of covering traumatic events.

Sarah Leen

In 2013 Sarah Leen became the first female Director of Photography at National Geographic Partners. In late 2019 she founded the Visual Thinking Collective, a community for independent women editors dedicated to visual storytelling.

As a student at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Leen was the first woman to receive the College Photographer of the Year award. For 20 years she worked as a freelance photographer for the National Geographic magazine until 2004 when she joined the staff as a Senior Photo Editor.

Leen currently works with photographers and agencies consulting and editing projects and books, including America, Again with VII Photo, the 2020 FotoEvidence World Press Photo Book winner HABIBI by Antonio Faccilongo, Anders Wo by Petra Barth and Like a Bird by Johanna-Maria Fritz.

Leen mentors photographers and teaches visual storytelling at the Missouri Photo Workshops, Maine Media Workshops, Eddie Adams Workshop and Santa Fe Photo Workshop.

Raised in Washington D.C., Gabrielle Lurie picked up a camera at 17-years-old. She learned photography in the darkroom as a high school senior. After graduating she moved to New York City where she studied art history and fine art photography at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. In 2014 she moved to San Francisco to start her career as a freelance photojournalist.

In 2016, Lurie joined the staff of The San Francisco Chronicle where she has been pursuing both stills and video. Most recently she began organizing the Bay Area Women Photograph group where photographers in the San Francisco area gather for events, to share ideas and collaborate on work.

Lurie was twice recognized as Photographer of the Year by Pictures of the Year International. She was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize.

Jillian Kumagai is a visuals editor at ProPublica, where she has edited photography for investigative stories since 2016. She has collaborated with Catchlight and local newsrooms all over the country and edited projects that have appeared in the Photoville FENCE and been recognized by American Photography and ONA's Online Journalism Awards.

Bill Marr

After starting a career in photography at a small yet very special newspaper—The Columbia Daily Tribune in Columbia, Missouri— Bill Marr started editing his colleagues’ work and designing photo pages. One thing led to another. He's worked on newspapers and magazines as a photographer, picture editor, designer and art director; freelanced from Philadelphia and Annapolis working on books, corporate magazines and annual reports; and was Creative Director for National Geographic magazine for 10 years. After leaving NatGeo in 2015, he was The Nature Conservancy’s director of photography.

Marr now teaches photo editing through Santa Fe Workshops and Maine Media with his wife, Sarah Leen. They live in mid-coast Maine.

Lois Raimondo

Lois Raimondo is an Associate Professor of Journalism at Reed College of Media, West Virginia University. She began her journalism work translating for CBS News in China during President Reagan’s presidential trip to Beijing. At the time, she was a graduate student living in a remote Chinese village collecting folktales for a master's degree in comparative literature. Raimondo lived and worked full-time in Asia for 10 years, including four years as chief photographer for the Associated Press in Hanoi, Vietnam. As one of the first American reporters into north Vietnam since the Vietnam War, she explored and reported on every aspect of the emerging new-economy society. Raimondo went on to specialize in conflict and human rights stories, smuggling in over the Himalayan mountains mid-winter to report on martial-lawed Tibet and Indian Kashmir.

Prior to teaching at WVU, Raimondo was a staff photographer at The Washington Post for ten years, covering everything from a local organic Virginia farm to the anti-American uprising in Iraq and the Ramadan Offensive in Afghanistan.

While still an intern, her investigative series on corruption in Mitchell Lama Housing for New York Newsday was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. In 2005, she was awarded the Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship to report on the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan. She spent the year working in the northwest frontier provinces of Balochistan and Waziristan. She won the Weintal Prize for Diplomatic Reporting in 2002 for her frontline reporting on the war in Afghanistan.

Randy Olson

Randy Olson is a photographer in the documentary tradition. Randy’s 30+ National Geographic projects have taken him to almost every continent. National Geographic Society published a book of his work in 2011 in their Masters of Photography series. Olson was the Magazine Photographer of the Year in the 2003 Pictures of the Year International (POYi) competition, and was also awarded POYi’s Newspaper Photographer of the Year in 1991 — one of only two photographers to win in both media in the largest photojournalism contest operating continuously since World War II.

In 2011, Randy founded The Photo Society. The purpose of the organization is to find economic opportunities and provide exposure to members as the economics of print dwindles. While working as a newspaper photographer at The Pittsburgh Press, Olson received an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship in 1995 to support a seven-year project documenting a family with AIDS, and a first-place Robert F. Kennedy Award for his story on problems with Section 8 housing in 1991. He was also awarded the Nikon Sabbatical grant and a grant from the National Archives to save the Pictures of the Year collection.