UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — An award-winning photojournalist who has spent more than 20 years documenting human resiliency in her hometown of Richmond, Virginia, and who had one of her photos selected by CNN for a 2020 list of “100 Photos that Defined the Decade” will be the first speaker in the Journalism Speakers Forum, featuring weekly speakers during the fall semester at Penn State.
Regina Boone’s presentation will kick off the series at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 8, via Zoom.
The series of special guest presentations was coordinated by Will Yurman, the Norman Eberly Professor of Practice in Journalism in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications.
Along with two decades at The Richmond Free Press, Boone's family’s weekly paper in Virginia, she worked for the Detroit Free Press for nearly 14 years. In 2016, Time magazine chose a portrait of hers as its cover image documenting the Flint water crisis. That same photograph, a toddler afflicted by the contaminated water, was selected for the CNN list four years later.
Following graduation from Roland Park Country School in Baltimore in 1988, Boone attended Spelman College. She taught English while living in Osaka, Japan for three years. Later she studied photojournalism as a graduate student at Ohio University's School of Visual Communication.
In 2018, she completed the Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan, where she began researching her paternal Japanese grandfather, Tsuruji Miyazaki, and his wrongful arrest on Dec. 7, 1941, in Suffolk, Virginia, along with other Japanese Americans across the country. Her father, Raymond H. Boone, was just 3 years old at the time. He gave her this last assignment to find out more about the father he never knew during his final days while fighting pancreatic cancer.
A complete schedule for the Journalism Speakers Forum may be found online.