Faculty
Sarah Blesener
Sarah Blesener is a documentary photographer based in New York City. Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, she studied Linguistics and Youth Development. While in university, she worked as a photographer for the organization Healing Haiti based in Port au Prince, Haiti, covering events surrounding the 2010 earthquake. Upon graduation, she studied at Bookvar Russian Academy in Minneapolis, concentrating on the Russian language. She is a graduate of the Visual Journalism and Documentary Practice program at the International Center of Photography in New York. Her latest work revolves around ideologies amongst youth in Russia, Eastern Europe, and the United States. She was the recipient of the Alexia Foundation grant for her 2017 work in the United States, and was also a 2017 fellow with Catchlight, working with Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. In 2018, she was a recipient of the Eugene Smith Fellowship. In 2019, her personal project, Beckon Us From Home, received a first place prize in the Long-Term Project category of World Press Photo. www.sarah-blesener.com
Sarah Fretwell
Students will learn postproduction and editing from Sarah Fretwell whose award-winning work explores the lives of everyday people with extraordinary stories and creates the human connection that engages people on a personal level.
Her work offers individuals a voice for justice, insight for solutions, and the human connection needed for international engagement. Some of her notable work and clients include the United Nations, USAID, Tara Oceans Foundation, The Royal Academy of Engineering, The Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation, BioCarbon Fund Initiative for Sustainable Forest Landscapes, Bloomberg Quicktake, CNBC and Newsy. As a storyteller, she looks deeper into the intersection of the environment, people, and business with one question in mind: “What if the new bottom line was love?
She loves collaboration, working as a team, creating compelling stories, and living outside of the box. Some of her favorite past times include sipping on farmers market green juice, spiking her espresso with superfoods, surfing in Papua New Guinea, hitchhiking through remote jungles of Indonesia, biking Gibraltar peak in Santa Barbara, visiting with Syrian Refugee families in Southern Turkey, and road-tripping through Banff Canada. www.sarahfretwell.com
Brian Frank
A native of San Francisco, Brian Frank has worked on social documentary projects across the Americas focusing on cultural identity, social inequality, violence, workers rights and the environment.
In 2017, Frank was awarded a fellowship by the Catchlight foundation to continue his work documenting mass incarceration's effects on minority communities. This two-year project, Downstream: Death of the Colorado. is held in the permanent collection of the United States Library of Congress and was recognized by POYi with the Global Vision Award. His project on the drug war and culture of violence in Mexico, La Guerra Mexicana, was awarded the Domestic News Picture Story of the year by the NPPA. Frank’s work has been recognized with numerous other awards from both national and international press organizations.
After completing the Journalism program at San Francisco State University, Fran worked primarily for The Wall Street Journal from 2008-2014 and currently focuses on long-term documentary magazine features in California, the American Southwest, and Mexico.
Frank’s work has appeared in Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, California Sunday Magazine, Harpers, The Atlantic, GQ, Esquire, Fortune, Mother Jones, Newsweek, TIME, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Wired, Politico, Virginia Quarterly Review, PDN, American Photo, The Fader, The New York Times, U.S.News & World Report, The San Francisco Chronicle and other publications. www.brianfrankphoto.com
Ed Kashi
Ed Kashi is a photojournalist, filmmaker and educator dedicated to documenting the social and political issues that define our times.
Kashi’s images have been published and exhibited worldwide. His innovative approach to photography and filmmaking produced the Iraqi Kurdistan Flipbook. Using stills in a moving image format, this creative and thought-provoking form of visual storytelling has been shown in many film festivals and as part of a series of exhibitions on the Iraq War at The George Eastman House.
An eight-year personal project completed in 2003, Aging in America: The Years Ahead, created a traveling exhibition, an award-winning documentary film, a website and a book which was named one of the best photo books of 2003 by American Photo. Along with numerous awards, including honors from Pictures of the Year International, World Press Foundation, Communication Arts and American Photography, Kashi’s editorial assignments and personal projects have generated four books. In 2008, his latest books will be published, both by powerHouse Books; Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta and Three.
“Ed Kashi is intelligent, brave and compassionate. He always understands the nuances of his subjects. He fearlessly goes where few would venture. And he sympathetically captures the soul of each situation. Ed is one of the best of a new breed of photojournalistic artists.” David Griffin, Director of Photography, National Geographic. www.edkashi.com
Mary Beth Meehan
Meehan, the granddaughter of immigrants to Massachusetts, has spent the past twenty-five years embedding herself in communities across the United States, combining writing, photography, and large-scale photographic installations to challenge dominant narratives and jolt people into reconsidering one another. Her large-scale portraiture installation in Newnan, Georgia, was featured on the front page of the Sunday New York Times on Martin Luther King weekend in 2020, and included an in-depth article on how the project helped to shift perceptions in that small town. www.marybethmeehan.com/
Ruddy Roye
A native of Jamaica, Roye has crisscrossed the country engaging on a personal level with the African-American experience, combining deep research, writing, and self-reflection to contextualize what he sees for his viewers. As one of the premier innovators and artist-activists on the Instagram platform, he has amassed 300,000 followers and was Time’s 2016 Instagram Photographer of the year. Widely exhibited and published, he has received assignments and been featured in such publications as The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic and Time. www.ruddyroye.com/
Glenn Ruga
Glenn Ruga is the founder of the Social Documentary Network and Executive Editor of ZEKE magazine. He is also the art director for ZEKE magazine and the former art director for LOUPE, the journal of the Photographic Resource Center. Ruga has an independent communications and design practice working with nonprofit and educational organizations (www.vizcom.com) and has an MFA in graphic and advertising design from Syracuse University.
Michael Snyder
Michael Snyder is a photographer, filmmaker, and environmental scientist who uses his combined knowledge of visual storytelling and conservation to create narratives that connect people to the other-than-human-world and drive social change. He is a Fellow at the Bertha Foundation, a Blue Earth Alliance Photographer, a National Science Foundation Grant Collaborator, a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, and the co-founder of two environmental organizations. He holds an MSc in Environmental Sustainability from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
Through his production company, Interdependent Pictures, he has directed films in the Arctic, the Amazon, the Himalaya, and East Africa. His journalism work has been featured by outlets such as National Geographic, The Guardian, VOX, BBC, Roads & Kingdoms, The Washington Post, High Country News, Condé Nast, and NPR. His films have been selected to over 40 festivals and have taken home numerous awards.
Snyder grew up on 12 acres of woods in Appalachia and spent much of his early adulthood exploring the remote corners of this planet. These experiences set in motion an ongoing love affair with the wildness of this world and desire to re-connect people to it. Snyder’s projects are often built through partnerships with nonprofit organizations and harness the power of positive storytelling in order to shift the narrative about what it means to live well on this planet without destroying it.
An adventurer at heart, Snyder has hiked the Appalachian and John Muir Trails, cycled across Europe, and ridden trains across Siberia. He has lived around the world including long-term stints in Scotland, Japan, Hawaii, and New Zealand. He currently resides in Charlottesville, Virginia with his wife and two children. www.michaelosnyder.com
