Elie Gardner.University of Missouri, B.J. Elie is an award-winning, St. Louis-based photojournalist and educator. She majored in Journalism at the University of Missouri and spent six months studying in San José, Costa Rica at the University of Costa Rica. She studied journalism and photography with the Associated Press’ Diverse Voices/Diverse Visions program and in a six-week fellowship at the Poynter Institute. Elie was a crew member for the Missouri Photo Workshop in 2003 and 2005, and directed the photo sequence at the Greater St. Louis Association of Black Journalists’ Minority Journalism Workshop in 2007 and 2008, a position she will hold again in fall 2009. She completed photography internships with the Columbia Daily Tribune, the Grand Forks Herald, and The Tico Times in San José, Costa Rica, and worked as the online photo editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She is currently an adjunct professor at WebsterUniversity and a staff photographer at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Elie is proficient in Spanish. Some of her photography, multimedia and editing work may be viewed online at www.eliegardner.com.
Photography
Mike Kautz. Middlebury College, B.A.; University of Montana, M.F.A. Mike majored in English and Environmental Studies at Middlebury, where he spent a semester at Lund University in Sweden and a winter term in the Dominican Republic on a traveling writing workshop with the author Julia Alvarez. After graduating he completed a semester program in documentary photography at the Salt Institute in Portland, Maine, where his subjects included moose hunters, French-Canadian musicians, and volunteer firefighters. Mike took on a photojournalism internship at the Salt Lake Tribune, spent three summers working as a publications photographer for Overland Adventures, LLC, in England, France, Switzerland, the Western U.S., and Alaska, and worked as an instructor at a National Geographic Photo Camp in Maine. He served as huts manager for the Appalachian Mountain Club in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, where he oversaw one hundred seasonal employees and managed the AMC’s High Mountain Search and Rescue operations. Mike recieved a Master of Fine Arts in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Montana. Some of his photography may be viewed on-line at www.quistphoto.com. Mike co-led the National Geographic Student Expedition to Tanzania in 2008.
This blog has been set up to allow family and friends of participants in the National Geographic On Campus in Bar Harbor program to check in on the progress of the group.
Photojournalist Amy Toensing has been on assignments around the world, producing stories that reflect the lives of ordinary people. A graduate of College of the Atlantic, Amy has photographed nine stories for National Geographic magazine, including a March 2003 article on the cultural heritage of Puerto Rico and a November 2007 piece on the kingdom of Tonga. Her story on MonheganIsland, a winter lobstering and artist community off the Maine coast, was featured in the July 2001 issue.
