David Stephenson

David Stephenson was a judge in the 2022 v02 Contest

David Stephenson has been the Photojournalism Adviser for the University of Kentucky’s student newspaper, the Kentucky Kernel, since 2009. David returned to his native Lexington and joined the staff of the Herald-Leader in 1997 before leaving to join the Kernel. He is a four-time recipient of the Kentucky News Photographers Association’s Photographer of the Year Award and has been named Sports Photographer of the Year three times. He won the National Press Photographers Association Region 4 Photographer of the Year in 2000 and 2002. Stephenson, a 1992 WKU graduate, recently completed a four-year project, “A New Dawn?”, following a young mother addicted to pain pills through a local Drug Court Program.

In 2005, David created heraldleaderphoto.com, a place for staff photographers to publish multimedia and slideshows. The site recently won a Media Eclipse Award for 2007 Kentucky Derby Coverage online. He also created a site specifically for one of his favorite series of stories on oddly name towns in Kentucky, Project Dateline. David led the staff’s charge into multimedia and has produced videos and multimedia projects which have won awards in the Atlanta Photojournalism Seminar, POYi, NPPA’s Best of Photojournalism, and The Southern Short Course.