MPPA News

The annual MPPA seminar and Pictures of the Year contest will be held Friday and Saturday, February 25 and 26 at the Quality Inn in Lansing. Please download our PDF registration form and follow the instructions listed to register.

Thanks to our judges for this year’s POY contest:

Jennifer Brown received a BFA in Photography from C.W. Post in Long Island, New York, where she studied with her mentor Arthur Leipzig. Brown worked at a series of small newspapers in the Midwest before coming to New Jersey 12 years ago. In 1999 she joined the staff of the Star-Ledger. In 2009, Brown was named the New York Press Photographer of the Year. She lives in Jersey City with her husband Joe — a high school history teacher — and her twelve-year-old son Eli.

Justin Rumbach is a fourth-generation editor at The Herald in Jasper, Ind., following in the footsteps of his great-grandfather, A.T., grandfather, Jack and father, John. After graduating from Indiana University in 2000, Rumbach began his career as a photojournalist, working at the Midland (Mich.) Daily News and the Evansville Courier & Press before returning to his hometown and joining The Herald as a staff photographer in 2006. Early last year, he took on the role of managing editor and now oversees daily newsroom operations. In addition to daily production, Rumbach also assists in editing and designing the newspaper’s Saturday feature, The Herald’s weekly vehicle for documenting daily life in Dubois County. He has won numerous state, regional and national awards, including NPPA’s Region 4 Photographer of the Year in 2005, NPPA’s Picture Editor of the Year (Team) in 2009 and Indiana Photographer of the Year last year. He and his wife, Abbie, have three children, Hadley, Cameron and Jack.

For the past nine years Jeanie Adams-Smith has been a professor in the photojournalism department at Western Kentucky University, one of the top college programs in the country. Jeanie is an award-winning photojournalist and has published three books of her photography. Jeanie’s multiple awards range from Kentucky Photographer of the Year in 2006 to first place in Pictures of the Year International for a multimedia piece of children of divorce in 2000.

In the past several years Jeanie has traveled twice to Cuba, documenting the everyday lives of people in Old Havana. She has also been to Western Ireland documenting farming culture. The work has won her several regional and national awards. Currently she is working on a book project, The Doorways of Old Havana, which will feature her work from Cuba. Her latest work has focused on cancer and Hospice programs in South-Central Kentucky.

Jeanie has won international awards for her social documentary photographs, including work for Planned Parenthood, Vanderbilt’s Burn Unit for children, and projects on brain injury and survivors of rape and sexual assault. One of Jeanie’s largest projects documented children coping with divorce. Her book Survivors: Children of Divorce, was nominated by WKU for a Pulitzer Prize entry in non-fiction literature.

Before coming to Western, Jeanie was a photo editor at the Chicago Tribune. Most of her time was spent as the National/Foreign Picture Editor, which included researching and assigning photographs for the national and foreign bureaus and working on many of the Tribune’s special projects, including Killing Our Children, a year-long documentary on the children murdered in Chicago in 1993, that won the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Journalism.

Jeanie has been a photo editing coach for the Mountain Workshop, has spoke at national conferences, like Southwestern Photojournalism Conference and she has judged national and regional photo competitions, including White House News Photographers Association, Photographer of the Year International , Society of Newspaper and Design and Ohio, Michigan and Indiana State POY contests.

She is a mother of a beautiful 7-year-old daughter, Abigail and has been married to her best friend, David for 14 years.