Manny Crisostomo joined the Sacramento Bee in August 2002 as senior photographer. His career began at the Pacific Daily News, where he started as an intern reporter and advanced to photographer. Upon graduating in photojournalism from the University of Missouri, he went to work for the Detroit Free Press in 1982. While working for the Free Press his work was honored with multiple awards from The Associated Press, The News Press Photographers Association, the Society of Newspaper Designers as well as a photojournalism citation in the 1988 Robert F. Kennedy Awards for his work “Too Young to Die”. He was named Michigan Photographer of the Year in 1987 and 1988 and nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize, winning in 1989 for “A Class Act: The Life and Times of Southwestern High School”. In 1991, he returned to his native Guam to document the island and the Chamoru people and teach photojournalism at the University of Guam. In 1995, he founded Latte Magazine, a city magazine that chronicles the life and times of the people of Guam and Micronesia. Crisostomo has four published books - “Mainstreet: Small Town Michigan” (1986), “Moving Pictures: A Look at Detroit from High Atop the People Mover” (1987), “Legacy of Guam: I Kustumbren Chamoru” (1992) and “Guam from the Heavens” (1998). Most recently, his images of Hmong refugees won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for International Photography.

Monty Davis is currently the Night Photo Editor at The Kansas City Star, a post he has held since November of 2003. Before joining the Star, he worked for six years as a photographer and photo editor at The Wichita Eagle in Wichita, Kansas. He has also worked for newspapers in Hutchinson, Kansas, St. Joseph, Missouri, and Hays, Kansas.

His strong interest in multimedia has led the Star to move Davis to the paper’s website, kcstar.com, where he will shoot and edit video and create multimedia packages.

Judy Siviglia received her master’s degree in Mass Communication from the North Carolina School of Journalism at Chapel Hill in 1995. After graduation, she spent a year in San Francisco as the assistant photo editor on Rick Smolan’s 24 Hours in Cyberspace. She returned to North Carolina to work as a newspaper photographer, first at the Gaston Gazette and, then, at The News & Observer in Raleigh.

Working at The News & Observer, she became interested in recording audio for picture stories and started producing multimedia pieces of her work. This led to a job with newsobserver.com, where she introduced audio, video, multimedia slideshows and interactive graphics to the newspaper’s web site.

She recently moved to Portland, Oregon with her partner and is taking care of their 2-year-old son.

Scott Strazzante was inspired to become a photojournalist by an exhibition of the work of former Chicago Tribune photographer Paul F. Gero at a Ripon College gallery show in Ripon, Wisconsin in 1984. In 1987, Strazzante started his career by covering his south Chicago neighborhood and the surrounding area for The Daily Calumet and moved in 1988 to The Daily Southtown, where he was almost exclusively a sports photographer for 10 years. Strazzante moved to the Joliet Herald News in 1998 where, over the course of three years, he was recognized twice as Region 5 Photographer of the Year, the Southern Photographer of the Year, and the POYi Newspaper Photographer of the in 2000. In 2001, Strazzante joined the staff of the Chicago Tribune where he now works on long-term projects as well as covering general news and sports.

While at the Chicago Tribune, Strazzante has been named Illinois Press Photographers Association Photographer of the Year twice (2002 and 2004). Most recently his work won 1st Place in the Sports Portfolio and Olympic Picture Story categories of the 2004 POYi and Honorable Mention in the NPPA BOP Newspaper Photographer of the Year category.

Mary Vignoles has been the Deputy Director of Photography at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel for the past three years. Prior to joining the Sun-Sentinel, she was a picture editor at the Free Lance Star in Virginia and a photojournalist for 10 years in California. Vignoles has won numerous awards for picture editing from the Pictures of the Year International Competition and the Society for News Design.