College Photographer of the Year judging takes place Oct., 22, 2021 - Oct. 31, 2021 in Columbia, Missouri at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Judges for the 76th Annual competition are David Barred, Marie D. De Jesus, Jared Soares, Sally Stapleton, Mallory Benedict, Alex Wong, Ed Kashi, Liz Baylen and Lauren Frohne.
Lauren Frohne is a visual journalist with more than a decade of experience producing award-winning, innovative video stories, documentary films, and interactive digital projects. She is currently the Lead Video Journalist at The Seattle Times, where she collaborates with a small video team and staff photojournalists to produce character-driven stories that explore social issues, news, and the diversity of the Seattle community.
She directs, films and edits news, feature and investigative video stories and collaborates across departments to conceptualize and execute visual projects and explore new ways of telling stories. Before joining The Seattle Times in 2014, she was the multimedia producer for the Open Society Foundations, and before that, she was a video journalist for The Boston Globe. Her work has taken her all over the world — from Liberia to Slovakia, Haiti to the Galapagos Islands, Romania, Senegal, and across the United States — and has been recognized by POYi, NPPA Best of Photojournalism, ONA, National Edward R. Murrow Awards, SND, regional Emmys, Webby Awards and the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism, among others.
As a Roy H. Park Fellow, she earned a master’s degree in journalism with a focus on visual communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010. She is regularly invited to teach at multimedia storytelling and video production workshops for students and professionals — including Western Kentucky's Mountain Workshops and the Story Arc cinematic journalism workshop — and has been a faculty member of the NPPA Multimedia Immersion workshop since 2013. She speaks on the topics of visual journalism and diversity and inclusion at journalism conferences and events all over the country, including the Atlanta Photojournalism Seminar in both 2014 and 2018 and the NPPA Women in Visual Journalism conference. Additionally, she co-founded the Visual Storytellers Community Fund, a scholarship for emerging visual journalists at UNC-Chapel Hill that is fully funded by young alumni.