Samaruddin Stewart

Samaruddin “Sam” Stewart is a media professional presently based in Budapest, Hungary.

Immediately prior to his relocation to Europe, Samaruddin was the Principal Photography Editor (Senior Manager) for AOL, the leading global ad-supported internet company, a division of Time Warner. During his six years at AOL, Samaruddin helped direct the visual programming for AOL News, Sports, Business News and Entertainment web sites. Samaruddin supervised teams of photography editors in multiple global offices that programmed editorial content to support the most visited web sites on the AOL network.

Prior to joining AOL, Samaruddin worked as a photography editor at news service Agence France-Presse in Washington D.C. Before photo editing and management, Samaruddin originated visuals for several newspapers in Arizona including the East Valley Tribune and the Arizona Republic as a photographer and multimedia specialist. Samaruddin earned both his B.A. in Journalism and his Masters of Mass Communication degrees from Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism.

Samaruddin is an active member of the National Press Photographers’ Association, the White House News Photographers’ Association, the Society of Professional Journalists and the Online News Association. Samaruddin has also presented or worked on staff at SPJ’s annual convention, NPPA’s Northern Short Course in Photojournalism and has been a guest lecturer for the Department of Defense Armed Forces Information Service. In 2006, Samaruddin was awarded the SPJ Diversity Leadership Grant for 2006-2007. In 2007, Samaruddin was accepted as a fellow for a Knight Digital Media Center seminar on Online News. While based in New York City, Samaruddin served on the Executive Council for the Deadline Club, the New York chapter of SPJ.

Samaruddin also contributes as a judge for several leading journalism and photography contests including SPJ’s Sigma Delta Chi awards, The Best of the West, and Photo District News (PDN) Photo Annual.

Personally, Samaruddin has interests in travel and aviation; his aviation past includes documenting a 56-day around the world trip in 2001 that later was published as a photographic book and photographing a 25-day air race covering New Zealand in 2004.

Samaruddin also recently joined Momenta Workshops as an instructor and taught visual storytelling in Northern Uganda in March 2009.