Johnson
Mark Johnson
About: Mark E. Johnson teaches photojournalism and other visual journalism courses, serves as the college’s Chief Technology Officer and oversees facility planning and renovations of the Journalism Building. He is director of the National Press Photographers Association’s Best of Photojournalism competition. He directs the annual Woodall Weekend Workshop that takes advanced photojournalism students into rural Georgia counties to tell their stories as well as a fall workshop that has centered the Georgia National Fair. He developed the college’s first dedicated online news site and runs VisualJournalism.info.
Education
B.S., Photojournalism, Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication
M.S., Photography, Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication
Teaching Specialties
Mr. Johnson teaches courses in introductory and advanced photojournalism, documentary photojournalism, video journalism, graphic design and emerging journalism technologies.
Mr. Johnson emphasizes experiential learning in all of his classes and develops multiple workshops each year to bring his students into contact with diverse communities as well as industry professionals. Each spring, he leads the Woodall Weekend Workshop that brings students into a rural Georgia county to tell its story. The fall workshop focuses on what the Georgia National Fair means to citizens of the state. For both, industry professionals come in to work as coaches so the students can hear different view points and develop a broader skill set for showing the stories of communities.
Believing in practicing what he teaches, Mr. Johnson began a photo-a-day project in 2010, making and posting at least one photo online every day since and is now approaching 6,000 consecutive days.
Mr. Johnson has been a co-organizer of multiple international reporting trips, partnering students with the Associated Press to cover the Paralympic Games in 2016 in Rio de Janeiro and 2024 in Paris and the 2023 Women’s World Cup in Australia.
In addition to these major workshops, he leads numerous smaller, hands-on workshops each semester for students, including about a half-dozen Friday nights under the lights at regional high school football games.
He is a frequent speaker for the Georgia Press Association, National Press Photographers Association and has been on the visiting faculty at the Poynter Institute where he co-directed their major conference for journalism educators. In 2024, he launched the Journalism Educators Institute, a joint effort with the University of Wisconsin to help journalism faculty be better teachers. He has also been the Education Chair and an Interim Executive Director of the National Press Photographers Association which he helped relocate to Grady College in 2015. In 2019, he brought the NPPA’s Best of Photojournalism competition to the colleges which is staffed by student volunteers each spring.
Mr. Johnson also coordinates student projects dealing with climate change, is on the story collection steering committee for GeorgiaClimateProject.org and is an organizer of the bi-annual Georgia Climate Conference.
Experience
Mr. Johnson has been a visual storyteller since the late 1980s, working as a stringer for the Associated Press and Agence-France Presse. He has also spent time as a staff photographer at the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune and MetroWest Daily News, as an assistant chief photographer for Community Newspapers Company, photo editor of the Utica Observer-Dispatch and director of photography for SchoolSports Magazine and SchoolSports.com. He was a founding board member for the Intercollegiate Online News Network, chairing their annual conference as well as being the chair of the NPPA's Convergence conference. He currently serves as a board member for the Atlanta Center for Photography.
He is one of the founding members of the Writing with Light group that works with photojournalists and publications to develop public-facing policies on the usage of generative artificial intelligence imagery.
Mr. Johnson is also a four-time Sports Car Club of America Road Rally Divisional champion, has served on the SCCA’s National RoadRally Board and has been the director of the SCCA Atlanta Region's Road Rally program.
Awards and Fellowships
- National Press Photographers Association Educator of the Year, 2022.
- Grady College’s Darwin-Davis Award, 2015.
- Department of Journalism Teacher of the Year, 2008, 2011.