Chad A. Stevens is a storyteller. With a breadth of experience in photojournalism, multimedia and film, Chad's career spans the spectrum from the newsroom to long-term documentary filmmaking. In 2003, after beginning a workshop for his photojournalism students, Chad saw, for the first time, a scene that changed his life – a mountaintop removal coal mine. From that moment on, he began a project that confronts our ideas of energy extraction and consumption and documents the struggle of a grassroots movement to end mountaintop removal and begin the first sustainable energy, green jobs project in Appalachia. The film, The Coal War, is in production and recently won the New York Film Grant.
Between shooting trips to West Virginia and grant writing sessions, Chad has been a multimedia producer at MediaStorm and was twice nominated for a National Emmy Award for Innovative Storytelling, twice received the Webby Award in 2007 and 2008 and won duPont-Columbia Journalism Award in 2010. Currently he is a professor of visual communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but he has also taught in the documentary photography programs at the International Center of Photography, Western Kentucky University and Ohio University.
