2025 Grant Judging Weekend

The Alexia student proposals will be judged April 4 by Maye-E Wong of Reuters, Ron Haviv of the VII Foundation and independent visual storyteller Lynn Johnson, this year’s Alexia fellow. They will judge the professional category April 5. Both days will be moderated by Whitney Latorre of the Catalina Island Conservancy, formerly of National Geographic.

Maye-E Wong is an award-winning photojournalist and editor currently based in New York as the senior editor for Wider Image and Special Projects at Reuters. She leads photographers worldwide in visual long-form storytelling, from ideation through publication. She also represents Reuters at photo festivals where she shares her skills and experience with the newer generation of photographers. Wong joined Reuters in April 2023 after a distinguished two-decade career at The Associated Press, globetrotting from bases in Singapore and New York City. She has covered a wide range of global news events including the Rohingya refugee crisis in Cox’s Bazaar, political unrest in Thailand and Hong Kong, natural disasters, Black Lives Matters in the US and more than 35 trips to North Korea. She also has extensive experience covering global sports events like the Summer and Winter Olympic Games, and the FIFA World Cup. Her own photography has won multiple awards, including the Overseas Press Club’s Hal Boyle Award and the 2018 Ancil Payne Ethics in Journalism Award. She was a recipient of grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting and the IWMF. Wong served as juror in the 2017 and 2018 World Press Photo contests and sits on the Advisory Board of POY Asia. She is currently a member of the board of directors at the Eddie Adams Workshop.

Ron Haviv is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker and an award-winning photojournalist. He co-founded VII Photo Agency and the VII Foundation, where he currently serves as a director. He is dedicated to documenting conflict and raising awareness about human rights issues around the globe. Haviv has produced an unflinching record of the injustices of war covering over 25 conflicts, and his photography has had singular impact. His work in the Balkans, which spanned over a decade of conflict, was used as evidence to indict and convict war criminals at the international tribunal in The Hague. President George H.W Bush cited Haviv’s chilling photographs documenting paramilitary violence in Panama as one of the reasons for the 1989 American intervention. His work is in the collections of numerous museums and he has produced five monographs. He also has provided expert analysis and commentary on current events for the media including opinion pieces for The Washington Post and The New York Times and spoken at TEDx along with numerous other lectures at Universities and conferences. 

Lynn Johnson has worked for LIFE and Sports Illustrated and published 40 feature stories in National Geographic Magazine. She is known for finding beauty and meaning in elusive, difficult subjects—threatened languages, zoonotic disease, the gender spectrum and the many mysteries of the brain, including “Science of Touch,” “Blast Force Injury,” and “Profound Autism.” Her master’s thesis, “Hate Kills,” as a Knight Fellow at Ohio University, probed the impact of hate crimes. She has received numerous awards and grants, including the Robert F. Kennedy Award and the Chris Hondros Fund, and has been a Pulitzer finalist twice.

Whitney (Johnson) Latorre is the president and CEO of the Catalina Island Conservancy, a nonprofit dedicated to the responsible stewardship of Santa Catalina Island through conservation, education and recreation. Formerly, Latorre was National Geographic’s vice president for visuals and immersive experiences. She also was on staff at The New Yorker, first as a picture editor and later as the director of photography. Before joining the magazine, Latorre worked at the Open Society Foundations, where she managed an international grant competition and curated an exhibition of documentary photography.

THE LIVE JUDGING

Feel free to join us for The Alexia 2025 professional and student grants judging weekend (sponsored by Sony) APRIL 4–5 at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University in Newhouse I Room 102. Student submissions will be judged on Friday, beginning at 9 a.m. and will be followed by a Q&A session with the judges in the early afternoon, then the keynote presentation by past and current Alexia fellows Adriana Letorney and Lynn Johnson. The professional grant submissions will be judged on Saturday, beginning at 9 a.m. If you plan to attend and require assistive services, please contact Charlie Eaton at caeaton@syr.edu by March 21. (The event will not be live-streamed.)

Professional and student grant winners will be announced in mid-April, along with runners-up and finalist recognitions. The Alexia would like to thank Sony for sponsoring the grant judging weekend and Visura.co for its support as well as our pop-up grant and award partners for expanding this year’s offerings: the Eddie Adams Workshop, the fStop Foundation, the VII Foundation and Sony as well as Hendricks Chapel at Syracuse University and the CODE^SHIFT, Sports Media Center and Public Diplomacy and Global Communication programs at the Newhouse School.