Shana Sureck

Shana Sureck is a photographer and multimedia storyteller, with studios in Hartford and Western MA. For 20 years, she was an award-winning photojournalist with the Hartford Courant (1987-2008), covering international, national and local stories. While other photographers jumped at the chance to go overseas, Shana felt the most deeply satisfied finding the extraordinary in the ordinary and created “Rituals,” a bi-weekly column - in words and pictures – about personal, social and cultural rites that help celebrate and give meaning to our lives. Her two-year project “Leaving State,” which followed a young mother off of welfare when Connecticut’s welfare laws became the strictest in the country, won the Annie E. Casey Award for Meritorious Photojournalism.

Her love of stories and storytelling was born in the basement of the Public Theater in NYC when she was 15 and joined the Ben Fernandez Photo-Film Workshop. It quickly became her second home. Wandering in parks and neighborhoods around the city, she photographed and learned about the lives of people she might not have met without a camera. She went on to Wesleyan University where she received an interdisciplinary BA (Visual and Narrative History of the Person).

Deeply moved by inspiring stories, Shana wants to find new, compelling and economically viable ways to weave together still photography and video to create multimedia stories for mission-driven organizations (non-profits, foundations, universities). She has produced three documentary shorts in the past few years, two of them stories about African American artists who work with urban youth (Hartford, CT), one about positive aging (Bronx, NY).

Shana is grateful to the City of Hartford for awarding her a Small Business Development grant for artists that will allow her to attend this MediaStorm workshop.