AJ Chavar

AJ Chavar (he/him/his) joined the visual communications department in the Newhouse School in Summer 2023 as a Teaching Fellow in Immersive Journalism for 2023-24. He teaches classes in Photojournalism, Documentary Photography and Immersive and Spatial Storytelling.  

Chavar is a visual journalist with more than a decade of experience in major U.S. and international newsrooms. Beyond his extensive history reporting from the field, he has run teams as a producer at The New York Times, Washington Post and Vox.com, helped craft global news visual strategies at Apple and continually pushed into new forms of digital storytelling at every newsroom he has worked in. As a production technologist and creative strategist with The New York Times R&D lab, his current role, he helped create new workflows for 3D storytelling capture, oversees the public presentation of their research and output, and contributes real-world insight into how emerging technologies like AI, machine learning, natural language processing and computer vision could be used in the service of journalism. As a freelance director, cinematographer and photographer Chavar has worked with clients such as the WSJ, NPR, Storycorps, IDEO, NYT, Visura, Vanderbilt University and many others. 

He work has been noted with recognitions such as the Carnegie-Knight News21 fellow documenting the lasting effects of war on veterans and families at home in rural America, he received an Edward R. Murrow award for his work reporting on the shooting of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords while working as a field video journalist for The Washington Post, and several Emmys for local journalism projects, earned several White House News Photographer "Eyes of History" awards, and his work has also been recognized by the NPPA BoP, PoY, CPoY, SND and SPJ. 

Chavar studied photography as an undergraduate here at the Newhouse School. During his time as a VIS Faculty Fellow, Chavar will be teaching as well as expanding his creative research in journalism in a mixed reality space. He would like to use this fellowship to bolster his technical software skills in design and 3D creation and gain knowledge about design systems and theory.