David Stephenson was a judge in the 2023 v06 Photography Competition Contest

WPJA Judge since 2009 -

David Stephenson is a freelance photojournalist and an Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky's School of Journalism and Media. After hopscotching to jobs across the country for five years after graduating from WKU, Stephenson returned to his native Lexington and joined the staff of the Herald-Leader in 1997. He then left to join the Kentucky Kernel in 2009 as the photojournalism and multimedia adviser. He started teaching full time at UK in 2014. 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 twice.

Stephenson, a 1992 WKU graduate, published a four-year project, “A New Dawn?”, following a young mother addicted to pain pills through a local Drug Court Program. His multimedia piece for this series was awarded the Best Multimedia Project in the 65th POYi competition. A story about a Garrard County tobacco cutting competition was awarded First Place Multimedia News Story by POYi in 2010.

In 2005, Stephenson created heraldleaderphoto.com, a place for staff photographers to publish multimedia and slideshows. The site won a Media Eclipse Award for 2007 Kentucky Derby Coverage online. Stephenson 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.