Patrick O’Donnell

Carl Schumacher

Paul Van Allen, Nikon PROFESSIONAL SERVICES

Lead Judge: Dave LaBelle

Throughout his 50-year career, Dave LaBelle has been a photographer, editor, teacher, author and lecturer. 

LaBelle has worked for 20 newspapers and magazines in nine states, including the Anchorage Times, San Bernardino Sun-Telegram, Ventura County Star-Free Press, The Chanute Tribune, Ogden Standard-Examiner, The Sacramento Bee and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where he was assistant managing editor for photography. 

His work has won numerous awards including National Press Photographers Association Region 10 Photographer of the Year three times, runnerup to W. Eugene Smith for the first Nikon World Understanding award in 1974 and runner-up for the NPPA National Photographer of the Year award in 1979.  He was awarded the International Understanding Through Photography award by the Photographic Society of America in 2002. 

LaBelle is also a master teacher whose students have gone on to win more than 10 Pulitzer Prizes.  Shortly after his time as Photographer at the Sacramento Bee, he turned his sights towards teaching as a compassionate storyteller and was a key member of the legendary team who built Western Kentucky University’s renowned Photojournalism program.  NPPA honored him with the Robin F. Garland Award for photojournalism education in 1991.  He also taught at University of Kentucky and was director of Kent State University’s Photojournalism program for many years. 

He is the author of 5 books including The Great Picture Hunt which is widely regarded by many as the cornerstone book for shooting features. 

Lessons in Death and Life is a sensitive, in-depth discussion about photographing grief and delicate issues.  His most recent book Bridges and Angels: The Story of Ruth is his first novel based on the disappearance of his mother in the 1969 Ventura County Floods.

LaBelle has served as judge for Pictures of the Year International, and the Pro Football Hall of Fame Photo Contest among many others. 

Dave Burnett

American photographer David Burnett has been making photographs since the early 1960s, and has spent much of his career working for major news magazines - TIME, ParisMatch, GEO - around the world.  After stints with LIFE and TIME, and the French Gamma agency, he co-founded Contact Press Images in New York in 1975.  He has been awarded the Robt Capa Gold Medal (Overseas Press Club), NPPA Photographer of the Year, and World Press Photo “Press Photo of the Year.”
 He splits his time between the East Coast, and wherever a good story lurks.  

Carol Guzy

Carol Guzy was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and lived there until 1978 when she completed her studies at Northampton County Area Community College, graduating with an Associate's degree in Registered Nursing.   A change of heart led her to the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale in Florida to study photography. She graduated in 1980 with an Associate in Applied Science degree in Photography.

     She interned at The Miami Herald and upon graduation was hired as a staff photographer. She spent eight years at the newspaper before moving to Washington, DC in 1988 where she became a staff photographer at The Washington Post through 2014.  She is currently freelance.

     She is the first journalist to receive a fourth Pulitzer - for coverage of the Haitian earthquake in 2010.  Previously she was honored twice with the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography for her coverage of the military intervention in Haiti and the devastating mudslide in Armero, Colombia.  She received a third Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for her work in Kosovo. She has been named Photographer of the Year for the National Press Photographers Association three times and nine times for the White House News Photographers Association and has earned many other prestigious awards in her  chosen profession of photojournalism.  She specializes on long-form documentary human interest projects and news stories, both domestic and international and is currently a contract photographer with ZUMA Press.

Jonathan Newton

Jonathan Newton just completed his 37th season as a professional photographer. He joined the staff of The Washington Post in summer 2000 and took a buyout in 2023.

He started out at the Nashville Banner in 1986. After a little more than a year at the Banner, he moved to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he spent 10 years shooting assignments that included the Atlanta Braves. He joined the St. Petersburg Times in 1998 when the town landed an expansion baseball team.

A Louisville native and the youngest of eight children, Newton worked many jobs after high school, including apple picker in Canada, kitchen cleaner at the Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone National Park, aluminum siding installer, liquor store clerk, pot washer at a Jewish deli, fish fryer, house painter and busboy. It was as a student at Jefferson Community College that he got his first taste of newspapers, shooting pictures for the weekly student publication. With $300 saved from his busboy job, he went to a downtown Louisville pawnshop and bought his first professional camera equipment.

Newton has covered almost every major sporting event in the world: the Olympics in 1996, 2008 and 2016; the Kirkwall Ba in Scotland, in 2007; five World Series; seven National League Championships; seven NCAA Final Fours; the Kentucky Derby; the Preakness; The Stanley Cup Championship; several heavyweight title bouts in Las Vegas; college football championships; the Super Bowl; and countless high school sporting events.

Newton's awards include the Morris Berman NPPA Citation; White House News Photographers Association awards; Baseball Hall of Fame photo contest; first place in the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors sports competition; and three-time Georgia Photographer of the Year.

He lives in Maryland.

Jeanie Adams-Smith

Jeanie Adams-Smith is currently a professor in the Visual Journalism and Photography program at Western Kentucky University. She was the recipient of the Robin F. Garland Educator Award in 2020 for her excellence in teaching, awarded by the National Press Photographers Association. The classroom has been her home for twenty-two years and the students’ success is her true passion. But Adams-Smith also practices what she preaches.

Since arriving at WKU, in 2002 Adams-Smith has published two books of social documentary photography and was named 2006 Photographer of the Year by the Kentucky News Photographers Association. The university nominated her book, Survivors: The Children of Divorce, the culmination of six years of work, for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction.

Prior to WKU Adams-Smith worked at the Chicago Tribune as the national/foreign picture editor, published a photo-documentary book on minor league baseball, and a multimedia piece on the children of divorce that won first place in Pictures of the Year International.

Adams-Smith has also won international awards for photography documenting women’s health clinics in Chicago neighborhoods, Vanderbilt University’s burn unit for children, a family’s struggle with traumatic brain injury, and a photographic testimonial by survivors of rape and sexual assault in Kentucky.

She has traveled twice to Cuba, documenting the everyday lives of people in Old Havana, a World Heritage Site as yet untouched by international commerce. She has also been to western Ireland to document family farms threatened by industrial agriculture. The work has won her several regional and national awards. She recently returned from England where she taught at Harlaxton College for a semester and worked on a project on family farms in Europe.

Adams-Smith has been married 25 years to her husband David, and they share the joy of raising their daughter Abigail. Besides her family, her other passion is CrossFit and training for marathons.

Kurt Vinion

Kurt Vinion is an accomplished international magazine and news photographer who is currently a photo editor at Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty in Prague, Czech Republic.

After his studies at WKU, Kurt was named the Director of Photography at the University of Louisville Athletic Dept. After five years of working as a full-time sports photographer as well as freelancing for various organizations such as Reuters, the PGA, Breeders Cup, and as an official photographer for several Kentucky Derby's, Kurt left the United States to work in Prague at its English speaking newspaper The Prague Post before leaving a year later to work for Spectrum Pictures and  later under contract for Getty Images as well as Orchard Photography.

Kurt has won several 1st places in the NPPA for his reportages on street children in Ukraine as well as for his coverage of the political situation in Northern Ireland. In addition, Kurt has won a KNPA Sports Photographer of the Year as well as various awards in Czech Press Photo.