Santiago Lyon
Santiago Lyon (Born 1966 in Madrid, Spain) was Vice President and Director of Photography of The Associated Press from 2003 to 2016 responsible for the global photo report and the hundreds of photographers and photo editors worldwide who produce it.
Biography and career
Born in Madrid, Spain to American parents, Lyon has 30 years of experience in news-service photography and has won multiple photojournalism awards for his coverage of conflicts around the globe.
He covered the end of the civil war in El Salvador, the U.S. invasion of Panama, the first Gulf War, the Balkan wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, the civil war in Somalia and the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan among other major news and sports stories around the world.
He joined the Associated Press in 1991 in Cairo, after previously having worked for the Spanish news agency EFE, United Press International and Reuters.
Lyon served as the Associated Press photo editor for Spain and Portugal from 1995 until 2003, when he was named director of photography. In the same year, he was a Nieman Fellow in journalism at Harvard University.
Under his direction the AP won three Pulitzer Prizes for photography as well as numerous other major photojournalism awards around the world.
In 2005 the Associated Press earned its 29th Pulitzer Prize for photography,[1] for work on the war in Iraq by a team of eleven photographers,[2] five of them Iraqis.
In 2007, the Associated Press won its 30th Pulitzer Prize for photography,[3] for a single image made by Oded Balilty.
In 2013 the AP won its 31st Pulitzer Prize for photography for work on the civil war in Syria by five photographers, Rodrigo Abd, Manu Brabo, Narciso Contreras, Khalil Hamra and Muhammed Muheisen.
Lyon serves on the Board of Directors of the Eddie Adams Workshop and is a regular participant at the yearly tuition-free workshop in upstate New York.
He was a member of the Board of Directors of the Overseas Press Club OPC in New York City and chaired the OPC photo contest jury in 2010 and 2011.
Lyon taught at the 2010 Joop Swart Masterclass organized by the World Press Photo Foundation and was Chair of the Jury for the 2013 World Press Photo contest.
In 2012 he was a Sulzberger Fellow at Columbia University in New York, studying ways to enhance the value of the AP's photo output to better serve growing customer segments.
He is married to Emma Daly, Communications Director at Human Rights Watch. They live in New York City with their daughter and son.