POYi 66th Awards Program Featured Speakers

	Uriel Sinai Getty Images Uriel Sinai started photographing in his home town of Tel Aviv in 1993. Two years later he began working for local newspapers in his area, and in 2000 moved on to the Israeli daily, Haaretz. In 2003, Sinai joined Getty Images, covering Israel and the West Bank. He was based in the Gush Katif settlement in the Gaza Strip during Israel's disengagement in 2005 - coverage which subsequently earned him the first place story prize from the "World Press Photo" contest. Sinai has won awards from the National Press Photographers Association, the China International Press Photo Contest in 2007 and 2008, and the Days Japan Photojournalism Award in 2007. His work is published regularly in newspapers and magazines around the world including, Time, Newsweek, Paris Match, Stern, The Economist, The New York Times, USA Today, Der Spiegel and others. He is the 66th Magazine Photographer of the Year.
	Emelio Morenatti Associated Press Emilio Morenatti has been shooting professionally since 1989. He studied graphic design before becoming a photographer, later specializing in stock photography and computer graphics. He became a staff photographer for the EFE Spanish news agency in 1993. Since March 2004, he has photographed exclusively for the Associated Press in countries including: Afghanistan, Israel, the Palestinian Territories and Pakistan. A native of Spain, Morenatti has participated in photojournalism seminars at universities in Tenerife, Seville, Cadiz, Tarragona and Asturias. He is the winner of the Andalusian award for journalism and is the two-time winner of the Fuji competition for news photography. His work has been recognized by the National Headliner Awards 2005, Clarion International Photography and Days of Japan competitions in 2006. He won an honorable mention in Spot News at the World Press Photo Awards 2007 and the first place and the Grand Award in Photography of the Headliner awards for his portfolio of Pakistan in 2008.
	Jakob Carlsen Freelance Jakob Carlsen attended the Fatamorgana School of Photography in Copenhagen. In 1995 he was accepted at the Danish School of Journalism. From 1996 until 2002 he was employed as a photojournalist for Politiken, a newspaper in Copenhagen. In 2002 he took leave from Politiken to begin a freelance career. He has received numerous awards from The Danish Press Photorapher of the Year, World Press Photo, PDN and NPPA photo contests. In 2009 his book Family 365 was published. The book is a compilation of images shot daily by his three children, wife and himself. It provides a visual representation of a year of his family’s life. In 2005 he won an honorable mention in the NPPA contest for his photo essay "The Untouchables of India." He has since continued this project and is the 2008 POYi recipient of the World Understanding Award for his essay titled "Untouchables of Asia."
	Balazs Gardi VII Network Balazs Gardi is a Hungarian freelance photographer, who focuses on documenting the everyday life of marginalized communities facing humanitarian crises. His current long-term project aims to capture how water related social tensions and geopolitical conflicts shape the future of people worldwide.
	Seth Gitner Roanoke Times and Roanoke.com Beginning in the Fall of 2009 Seth Gitner will be an Assistant Professor of Newspaper and Online Journalism at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. Previously he was the multimedia editor for The Roanoke Times and Roanoke.com in Roanoke, Va. Before entering the online news side of journalism, Seth was a photojournalist for 10 years. Seth has taught multimedia storytelling at numerous photojournalism workshops around the country including: Poynter's Visual Edge Workshop, The Stan Kalish Picture Editing Workshop, The Eddie Adams Workshop, The NPPA NewsVideo Workshop, The Missouri Photo Workshop, The North Carolina Photojournalism Workshop, The Truth With a Camera Workshop, The Keystone Multimedia Workshop and the CICM Multimedia Workshop. He strives to help still photographers see the value of learning new skills to tell stories online through still images, video, and interactivity. He is a past president of the Virginia News Photographer's Association, and presently chairs the multimedia committee for the National Press Photographers Association. Each month he writes a column for the NPPA News Photographer Magazine called "Multimedia Moments." While at The Roanoke Times and Roanoke.com the team won the top online awards from Editor and Publisher magazine, the Newspaper Association of America, the Associated Press Managing Editors Association and the Online News Association. He is a past recipient and finalist of the Scripps Howard Award for Web Reporting and the 2009 Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism in Multimedia. The Roanoke Times and Roanoke.com won a total of 13 awards for their multimedia content in the 2008 NPPA Best of Photojournalism for The Web Contest. Most recently he was part of a team that was recognized for the 2008 Best Documentary Project by Pictures of the Year International. He is a co-director of the Third Annual NPPA Multimedia Immersion Workshop.
	Josh Meltzer Roanoke Times and Roanoke.com After 9 years as a staff photographer and multimedia journalist at The Roanoke Times in Roanoke, Virginia, Josh Meltzer accepted a Fulbright Scholarship last August to work and teach in Mexico where he has been creating a multimedia project about the migration of indigenous families within Mexico. In addition to his own work, he has been teaching photography to a group of nineteen 11-16 year-olds through a program called Listen to My Pictures, which recently culminated with a show at a large regional museum in Guadalajara in June. While at The Roanoke Times, Josh created his first audio slideshow in 1999, and over the next decade created over a hundred audio slideshows, both on daily deadline, and for long-term projects. A few years later he began using video in his reporting, and now uses a mix to create stories through the voices of his subjects and natural sound. This year, a long-term multimedia project from 2008 on those who provide care for the elderly, called Age of Uncertainty, won the First Place Best Documentary Prize from the POYi, the community service award from the Virginia Press Association, the 1st place convergence award from the APME and the Casey Medals the multimedia prize . The project, shot over 9 months was made up of 8 multimedia stories. His still and multimedia work has been recognized by the NPPA�s Best of Photojournalism competition where he was the 2006 Photojournalist of the Year for markets less than 115,000 circulation. His audio slideshows, video stories and portfolios have been recognized by the Atlanta Photojournalism Competition, Northern and Southern Short Course and the Society of Newspaper Design. This August, Josh is switching gears, as he will begin work as a professional-in-residence at Western Kentucky University, teaching photojournalism and multimedia to students in Bowling Green.
	Beth Macy Roanoke Times and Roanoke.com Beth Macy is the families beat reporter at The Roanoke Times, where she has reported on such as issues as immigration, aging and teen pregnancy for the past 20 years. Her work has also appeared in American Journalism Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education and "Best Newspaper Writing: 2007-2008." In August, she will leave for Harvard University, where she will be a Nieman Fellow in Journalism for the upcoming school year.
	Sarah Leen National Geographic In December 2004 Leen made the leap from being a freelance photographer for the National Geographic Society magazine to joining the National Geographic staff as a photo editor. Since becoming a photo editor she has won the POYi Magazine Editing Portfolio award in both 2007 and 2008. This year Leen will be accepting the Angus McDougall Overall Excellence in Editing Award on behalf of the National Geographic. Director of Photo Editing Kurt Mutchler leads the National Geographic magazine photo editing staff. The photo editing staff includes Dennis Dimick, Bill Douthitt, Gail Fisher, Ken Geiger, Todd James, Elizabeth Krist, Sarah Leen, Kathy Moran, Sadie Quarrier and Susan Welchman. All photo editors are responsible for story development, budgeting, story research, and image editing from conception through story layout, as well as web galleries and multi-media.
	Jason Eskenazi Freelance The fall of the Berlin Wall led Jason Eskenazi out of Queens into the larger world. After trips to Germany and Romania for their first democratic elections he traveled to Russia right before the August 1991 coup that marked the end of the USSR. Eskenazi has returned to Russia many times since. The culmination of these visits can be seen in the book Wonderland: A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith. Wonderland was exhibited at Visa Pour L' Image in Perpignan, France, the Leica Gallery in New York and won the Best Photography Book in the 2008 Pictures of the Year International contest. In 2004 Eskenazi received a Fulbright Scholarship to return to Russia with a Russian colleague and photograph a series of large format color portraits. The project was titled Title Nation. Eskenazi has received numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1999), the Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor Prize (1999) and the Alicia Patterson Foundation Grant (1996). His work has appeared in many magazines including Time, Newsweek, The New York Times and Soros Foundation publications. In 2004 -2005 he organized a Kids with Cameras workshop in the old city of Jerusalem, teaching photography to Arab Muslims and Jewish children. The completed project was presented at the 92nd Street Y in New York. It was also featured on ABC News and in National Geographic and Hadassah Magazines. I am now organizing exhibitions for this project in the U.S. and I hope to bring it back to Israel and to the kids who shot it. Eskenazi is currently planning and researching his next project: The Black Garden set in the geographical locations known to the ancient Greeks. He is seeking out a sequence of visual metaphors that concerning the failure of those ideals and about a journey of lost traditions in an ever culturally ambiguous and ubiquitous world. During the last year Eskenazis has been a Security Guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; he often works in the Annenberg galleries making sure that no one touches the Van Gogh’s.
	Matt Eich Freelance Matt Eich is a freelance photographer with a passion for social documentary storytelling. He recently graduated with a degree in photojournalism from Ohio University. He has interned with The Orange County-Register, The Oregonian, and National Geographic Magazine. Matt's work has been recognized by POYi, PDN, The Magenta Foundation, American Photo and others. In 2006 he was named the 61st College Photographer of the Year. His long-term project, "Carry Me Ohio," which won the 2009 Community Awareness Award was funded in part by The Alexia Foundation for World Peace Student Grant, an Editorial Photographers Education Grant and two commendations in the Ian Parry Scholarship. His clients and publications include Newsweek, Mother Jones, The FADER, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian, GEO, Photo District News and others. He is represented by Aurora Select.
	Tim Hussin College Photographer of the Year Tim Hussin grew up on the Gulf of Mexico in Palm Harbor, Florida. He started documenting pieces of his life at a young age on family vacations and began shooting natural moments and landscapes in reaction to his mother's insistence to pose family photos. He later went on to study environmental science and journalism at the University of Florida and gradually applied photography to his curiosity of people and their environments. Although grateful for his formal education, Hussin grew most as a photographer during his internships at the The Gainesville Sun, Monroe Evening News, Deseret News and Rocky Mountain News. He is currently living in New York City interning at MediaStorm and will intern at National Geographic in Fall 2009. After completing his internships, Hussin plans to work on long-term documentary projects around the world and in his own backyard, focusing on stories that not only address social issues but celebrate life.