UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Three accomplished and award-winning journalists will be featured in two separate talks and question-and-answer sessions on consecutive nights, Oct. 6 and 7, as part of the Journalism Speakers Forum, which features weekly speakers during the fall semester at Penn State.
Visual journalist, writer and professor Tara Pixley will discuss her experiences photographing the Black Lives Matter movement as a Black female news photographer, as well as the ramifications of more diverse visual representation in news media coverage of marginalized populations at 7 p.m. Oct. 6 on Zoom.
Pixley, based in Los Angeles, has a decade-and-a-half of experience as a photojournalist and photo editor. Her photographic work and writing on photojournalism have appeared in the The Wall Street Journal, Scholastic, The New York Times, Nieman Reports, HuffPost, ESPN Magazine, Canon Pro, Black Scholar and many more publications. She was a 2016 Visiting Fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism and received a First Place 2017 FOLIO Ozzie Award for her Nieman Reports cover story on photojournalism. Pixley also is assistant professor of journalism at Loyola Marymount University.
The forum continues with wife-and-husband journalists Kainaz Amaria, a visual editor for Vox, and Gene Demby, co-host of the NPR podcast “Code Switch,” at 7 p.m. Oct. 7 on Zoom.
Amaria runs an interdisciplinary team specializing in graphics, interactives, photography, data and design. Previously, she was an editor on NPR’s visual team. Before her desk jobs, she was a freelance photojournalist based in Mumbai, India, with clients including The New York Times, Reuters and Vogue India. Prior to that, she worked for the St. Petersburg Times in Florida. In 2010, she was a Fulbright Scholar and completed a short film on the Parsi Zoroastrian community in Mumbai.
Demby is co-host and correspondent for NPR's "Code Switch" team. Before coming to NPR, he served as the managing editor for Huffington Post's BlackVoices following its launch; he later covered politics. Prior to that role he spent six years in various positions at The New York Times, and, while working for the newspaper in 2007, he started a blog about race, culture, politics and media called PostBourgie, which won the 2009 Black Weblog Award for Best News/Politics Site.
The series of special guest presentations was coordinated by Will Yurman, the Norman Eberly Professor of Practice in Journalism in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. A complete schedule for the Journalism Speakers Forum may be found online.