Bruce Strong

What he teaches ...

Through still photography, video, audio and multimedia storytelling, Bruce Strong teaches undergraduate, graduate and military students how to combine visual strategies and storytelling principles with a variety of technical tools to create compelling stories that powerfully engage the viewer’s heart and mind. In the process of teaching them how to tell a good story, Bruce also challenges students to evaluate their own goals and dreams, pushing them to live a story worth telling.

BRUCE STRONG is an award-winning photo/video storyteller, an associate professor at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications in New York, and the Alexia Endowed Chair, presiding over its annual international grant competition and other projects. Strong has traveled to nearly 80 countries and has worked as both a staff and an independent photojournalist/videographer around the world. His most recent travels have taken him to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, China, Chile, Oman, Mauritius, Mongolia, Lithuania, and South Sudan. Before expanding into academia, Strong worked at one of the largest newspapers in California for 11 years and has freelanced for a variety of international publications and nonprofit organizations. His images have been published in magazines including TIME and National Geographic and have earned numerous awards. He published his first book, “Armenia: The Story of a Place in Essays & Images,’’ and founded Photo Night®, a monthly event that has drawn up to 500 professional photographers and many of the most notable documentary photographers.

Strong also served as a Knight-Wallace Kellogg Public Policy Fellow at the University of Michigan, focused on the confluence of journalism and the arts in developing community leadership; a Scripps Howard Academic Leadership Academy Fellow at Louisiana State University, focused on developing skills to serve as deans, chairs, directors in journalism education leadership; as a Knight Fellow at Ohio University, where he earned a master’s degree in visual communications; and as the first professional in residence at MediaStorm (then in New York). While there, he helped produce “A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan,” which was nominated for an Emmy, was a finalist for Documentary of the Year at POYi, earned second place in Long Form Multimedia Story at POYi, and won the Media For Liberty Award. In the fall of 2023, Strong served as the VII Foundation’s first visiting scholar at the VII Academy in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

When he’s not in the field producing his own work, Strong spends most of his time helping others learn to tell stories that matter and considers teaching a rewarding and enlightening journey. Many of his students have won top honors from NPPA, POYi, World Press, and BOP even while still in school. He also mentored back-to-back College Photographer of the Year winners Matt Eich and Travis Dove. In 2010, Strong was honored with a Meredith Teaching Recognition Award from Syracuse University and the National Press Photographers Association’s Robin F. Garland Educator Award. Strong, who served for 10 years as chair of the Visual Communications department at the Newhouse School, also lectures, most notably at the Pingyao Photography Festival in Pingyao, China, and leads workshops for a variety of groups, including the National Press Photographers Association’s Multimedia Immersion Workshop, IEI Media in Valencia, Spain, the Maine Media Workshops, and the Eddie Adams Workshop. He has also been sent by the U.S. State Department to teach visual storytelling and photography to photojournalists in Oman and Mauritius. This coming summer, he will teach a four-week photography workshop in visual communication and cultural immersion in Arles, France. As a visual communicator and photographer, Bruce is inspired by a desire to bridge cultural divides and focus on our shared humanity.

Of everything, though, Bruce is most proud of his two sons, Jack and Cole, and loves adventuring through life with his designer/writer/curator/professor wife, Claudia.