Visual Journalist of the Year
NPR Visual Journalists
Short Form Video
First - NPR: "The Abu Naser family"
Second - NPR: "Reaching food in Gaza"
Third - NPR: "Are ICE agents covering their license plates as well as their faces?"
Long Form Video
First - The Washington Post: "Facing terminal cancer with a baby on the way"
Award of Excellence - WAMU: "Mikey's Day: An Uncertain Future for the Bright Center Adult Day Program"
Best Digital Storytelling Package, In-depth
First - The Washington Post: "He's dying. She's pregnant."
2026 Digital Storytelling Contest Judges
Jarrad Henderson is a four-time Emmy-winning visual storyteller, media entrepreneur and educator who helps aspiring and professional storytellers share confident narratives that reach the audiences they care most about. He brings over 15 years of visual and investigative journalism experience to Michigan State University, where he is a Professor of Practice in the School of Journalism.
During his 2022-2023 Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan, Henderson founded Pop Up Docs™, a pop-up style storytelling workshop that provides skill-building workshops for aspiring non-fiction filmmakers from underrepresented populations.
His professional work has been honored by organizations such as the Robert F. Kennedy Awards for Excellence in Journalism, the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists, the Sidney Hillman Foundation, the News Leaders Association, the Online News Association, and the National Press Photographers Association.
His leadership experience includes serving as the past Academic Representative for the National Association of Black Journalists – Board of Directors, multimedia judge for the Hearst Journalism Awards, and a Journalism Industry Advisory Board Member for PBS Student Reporting Labs.
Henderson is a graduate of the University of Missouri, where he earned his masters degree in journalism, and Arizona State University, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Photography.
Emily Kassie is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker and investigative journalist whose work lives at the fault lines of power and vulnerability. Her feature documentary Sugarcane, directed with Julian Brave NoiseCat—on which she also served as producer and cinematographer—investigates abuses at a former Indian residential school; the film premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Directing Award and Vanguard Award. It was later nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary and has received more than 50 international honors, including the National Board of Review Award for Best Documentary, a Cinema Eye Award and two Critics’ Choice Awards, with additional nominations from the Directors Guild, Peabody, Gotham, and Independent Spirit Awards. Acquired by National Geographic Documentary Films, Sugarcane is streaming on Disney+ and Hulu. Kassie’s work, including for Frontline PBS, The New York Times, and The Guardian, follows people surviving corrupt and violent systems—women resisting erasure under Taliban rule, Syrian child-workers keeping their families fed, migrants caught in trafficking schemes in the Saharan desert. Her New York Times investigation on sexual abuse in immigrant detention was cited in U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearings. Her short films and investigations have earned multiple Emmy nominations and won honors from the Peabody Awards, Edward R. Murrow Awards, Overseas Press Club, World Press Photo, and National Magazine Awards. She was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 and was a New America Fellow and Sundance Catalyst Fellow. Previously, Kassie oversaw visual journalism at Highline (HuffPost) and The Marshall Project, where she launched a Sundance Institute partnership supporting incarcerated and formerly incarcerated filmmakers. She graduated from Brown University and was a Gates Scholar at Cambridge. Her first short documentary, I Married My Family’s Killer, won the 2015 Student Academy Award. Kassie is currently writing a book to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2028.
Steve Sapienza is an award-winning news and documentary producer who has covered a wide range of human security stories in dozens of countries, including the HIV crisis in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, child soldiers in Sierra Leone, climate refugees in Bangladesh, and landmine survivors in Cambodia. For more than 20 years he has shot and produced stories for broadcast television and online distribution.
As Senior Editor for U.S. News Partnerships at the Pulitzer Center, he works closely with the Center’s grantees and fellows, new media makers, and newsrooms to identify the collaborative space, digital tools, reporting strategies, and partnerships that enable storytellers to best reach their audience. He is the editorial team lead for the Center’s StoryReach U.S. fellowship program, an audience-engagement accelerator in which journalists hosted at local U.S. outlets work together to innovate and combine breakthrough reporting with creative, effective audience outreach strategies.
