Reimagining the Photojournalism Career
This moderated discussion brings together industry professionals who have applied their photojournalism backgrounds in new directions. Mark Dye, Senior Photographer with the Photographic Bureau at Con Edison, Stephanie Mitchell, Director of Photography at Harvard University and Sarah Evans, visual team lead at the Photo Lab at Mass General Hospital will share how their careers evolved beyond traditional newsroom roles while still drawing on the core skills of photojournalism.
Through candid conversation, the panelists will discuss their professional paths and how storytelling, visual judgment, and journalistic instincts translate into work in corporate, institutional, and communications environments. This session offers a look at how the values and skills of photojournalism remain relevant across a wide range of fields in today’s changing media landscape.
Speakers
Mark Dye
Mark Dye is a recovering photojournalist from Buffalo who has spent the past 14 years as a senior photographer for the Photographic Bureau at Con Edison of New York, documenting the electric, gas, and steam utility that powers New York City.
Before moving into the corporate world, he spent two decades working as a freelancer, staff photographer, and contractor for Reuters and newspapers including The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, the Watertown Daily Times, and the Niagara Gazette, among others. His assignments took him from breaking news and professional sports to major disasters, including hurricanes and the earthquake in Haiti, as well as an embed in Iraq.
When he first accepted a “corporate” job, Mark admits he felt a little guilty leaving the newsroom behind. But the work quickly proved just as compelling. Forensic photography, fire investigations, portrait assignments, and documentary projects that involve climbing into manholes and riding bucket trucks have more than satisfied his storytelling instincts.
Mark lives in Manhattan and has a cabin in the Adirondack Mountains, where he spends time photographing wooden boats on Lake George.
Sarah Evans
Sarah Evans builds visual storytelling teams—and the systems that help them scale. While she began her career as a photojournalist, she quickly discovered her strengths work best when driving strategy, improving workflows, and enabling creative teams to produce their best work.
At Education Week, as Director of Photography, she expanded assignment capacity while reducing overall budget and increasing per-assignment pay for freelancers through operational planning. At Boston University, she gained experience in enterprise-scale operations, including union contract environments, FileMaker database systems, and brand platform management.
As Senior Managing Editor of Visual Content at TechTarget, Sarah led several high-impact initiatives: launching an internal “visual university” with more than 10 training courses for editors, developing new visual storytelling formats, building a centralized library of 1,200+ images that automatically distributed based on keyword matching across 65 sites, and creating a video program that increased production output by 50%.
Today she leads the MGH Photo Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital, managing a multidisciplinary team of photographers, videographers, an animator, a print specialist, and an office manager. The award-wining team supports visual needs across the Mass General Brigham enterprise and oversees revenue-generating services including visual production, large-format printing, and custom framing.
Stephanie Mitchell
Stephanie Mitchell is the Director of Photography at Harvard University where she has worked for over twenty-five years. Before coming to Harvard, she studied documentary photography at Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine, attended the Eddie Adams Workshop in upstate New York, freelanced for weekly newspapers around Boston through Community Newspaper Company, and worked for the Boston Herald photography department.
She applies the skills she learned through her education and work experience in photojournalism to university work where she leads the photography team whose work appears in the Harvard Gazette, the official news website for Harvard University.
Working alongside writers and editors, photographers cover a wide range of subjects across the undergraduate college and twelve graduate and professional schools, from science and technology to arts and humanities, from teaching and learning to issues of national and global concern, and from daily life to historic moments on campus.
Stephanie lives in Cambridge, MA, and in addition to photography, she creates pottery, plays gamelan music, and writes poetry. Viewfinder, her debut poetry collection published in November 2025, celebrates photography in verse.