The Lucies to Honor Ami Vitale

The Lucie Awards is the premiere annual event honoring the greatest achievements in photography. The photography community from around the globe pays tribute to the most outstanding people in the field. Each year, the Lucie Advisory Board nominates deserving individuals across a variety of categories. The goals of The Lucies are threefold: to honor master photographers, to discover and cultivate emerging photographic talent and to promote the appreciation of photography worldwide. Ami Vitale will be honored with the 2022 Humanitarian Award.

The Lucies will be held at Carnegie Hall on Oct. 25, 2022. Tickets are available at lucies.org.

Ami Vitale to Receive Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service

The Missouri School of Journalism has announced the 2022 recipients of the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service, a prestigious award recognizing lifetime or superior achievement in journalism or strategic communication. Two individuals and a nonprofit media organization will accept their medals at an evening reception and banquet on Wednesday, Oct. 19, beginning at 6 p.m. at The Atrium on Tenth, 22 N. Tenth St., in Columbia, Mo.

This year, Ami Vitale will be honored alongside Jeff Goodby, Co-founder and co-chair of advertising agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (GSP) and The Marshall Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to criminal justice journalism.

Medalists are selected by the faculty of the School, which has awarded the Missouri Honor Medal annually since 1930 to outstanding journalists, advertising and public relations practitioners, business people, institutions, and media organizations from around the world. Past winners have included Christiane Amanpour, Sir Winston Churchill, Gloria Steinem, Deborah Howell, David Granger and Gordon Parks.

Earlier on the day of the reception, the medalists will present masterclasses on their areas of expertise to the School’s students and other guests.

Learn more and make plans to attend the ceremony here.

The National Geographic Photo of the Decade

There are no words to adequately describe the profound feelings of hope and melancholy inspired by Joseph Wachira’s final goodbye to Sudan, the world’s last male northern white rhino. This image has been chosen as the best photo of the decade by the people who voted yesterday on National Geographic’s Instagram account. I will never forget what it felt like to witness what I believed to be the end of a species. Yet, in a beautiful twist of fate, this image – an image documenting extinction – is the beginning of something powerful, something hopeful.
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Our world faces so many challenges. Humans are ushering in a new era of mass extinction. While that thought keeps me up at night, the profound care that Joseph showed for Sudan inspires hope and drives me to work even harder. Those who feel the urgency of this moment in history, are coming together around this image. As I write this, embryos created by Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, Avantea, Ol Pejeta Conservancy, Kenya Wildlife Service and Safari Park Dvur Kralove wait to be transferred into a surrogate mother. This would not have been possible without your support. Please keep supporting the Biorescue Project. This matters.
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The coming decades will not be easy, but I believe we are making a real difference. You are my hope for a future that includes rhinos and other endangered species. The key thing is to not fall into the trap of thinking that these issues are too big to deal with or that someone else is taking care of the problems. It is up to all of us. It’s up to you. And to me. Be the VOICE for this planet. Don’t sit this one out. Without rhinos and elephants and other wildlife we suffer more than loss of ecosystem health. We suffer a loss of imagination, a loss of wonder, a loss of beautiful possibilities. Saving nature is really about saving ourselves. Sudan taught me that.

Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award

The nominees for the 2nd Annual Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award were announced today. Ami Vitale is one of the nominators for the prize.

This award is the first environmental award to single out innovators under the age of 40. It is created to serve as an early investment in our future, giving today’s top young minds the community and financial support that will take their ideas to the next level.

Ami nominated Asha de Vos, founder of Oceanswell, Sri Lanka’s first marine conservation research and education organization, and an important advocate for diversity in marine conservation.

Wildscreen Photo Story Panda Award

Ami was named one of the three finalists for the 2018 Wildscreen Photo Story Panda Award. To win this award is to have your work judged as one of the best examples in the natural world storytelling genre by the industry’s most respected and accomplished leaders.

The finalist gallery was recently featured in The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph.

2018 World Press Photo: First Place, Nature Stories

I’m humbled and honored to named the first place winner in the 2018 World Press Photo awards for my National Geographic story “Warriors Who Once Feared Elephants Now Protect Them.” Thank you to all my friends at Reteti Elephant Sanctuary Community United for Elephants for trusting me to share your powerful story, to my editors Alexa Keefe and Sarah Leen for giving us the platform to share it and now to World Press Photo, for further casting the light on this important story of community and conservation.

I was awarded a World Press Photo, Second Place, Nature, stories, in 2017 for “Pandas Gone Wild.” In 2015, I received a Second Place, Singles, award in the World Press Photo Nature category for “Orphaned Rhino,” which is also from my body of work on Northern Kenya, like this year’s prize. This work is a long term examination of the change in the relationship between people and animals in the region.

In the photo above, keepers feed baby elephants at the Retiti Elephant Sanctuary in northern Kenya, the first sanctuary in Africa to hire indigenous women as keepers.

Please have a look all of the World Press Photo stories. Some will break your heart, others may make you laugh and hopefully inspire all of us to work harder to find solutions to our planet’s most pressing challenges.

You can also see my lecture at the World Press Photo Festival, where I shared the full arc of my photographic journey, including this story on the Retiti Elephant Sanctuary.

Jackson Hole Science Media Awards: “My Africa”

My Africa, a blue-chip VR film Ami Vitale directed on the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary for Conservation International won top prize for VR/360 Storytelling in the Jackson Hole Science Media Awards.

From the infinitesimal to the infinite, science plays a profound role in virtually every aspect of our daily lives. There has never been a more dynamic time in scientific discovery and innovation and the need for communicating science to public audiences and policy-makers has never been more important!

Recognizing excellence and innovation in 22 Content, Program and Craft categories, the Jackson Hole Science Media Awards celebrate the world’s most effective science storytellers and stories. Award-winners will be showcased at special screening events hosted with partner organizations around the world.

See the full list of 2018 winners here.

Recognition for Pandas Gone Wild

Ami’s panda images for National Geographic earned third prize for science and natural history picture story in Pictures of the Year International second prize for stories in the Nature category in this year’s World Press Photo Contest, and are shortlisted for the 2017 Sony World Photography Awards

The contests were covered by dozens of media including the BBC, The AtlanticYahoo News, Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic Australia, The Express Tribune, the Daily Mail, and DigifotoPro, where she also gave interviews.