As an associate photo editor at National Geographic, I led multiple photography projects for Your Shot — their global community with more than 1M registered users — and delivered unique audience engagement opportunities and user generated editorial content for National Geographic’s digital and social media platforms.

I curated Your Shot’s Daily Dozen series, featuring editor’s favorite 12 photos selected from the 3-5K photos submitted daily by our community members — who then voted for their favorite photo which was recognized as Your Shot’s Top Shot of the day and featured on National Geographic Facebook, Twitter, and National Geographic Your Shot Instagram.

I started the Your Shot Photos of the Week series featuring stunning photos submitted that week as a Tumblr post that grew into a gallery on natgeo.com. Working with the National Geographic social media and SEO team to maximize digital impressions, I delivered a total of 1.65 million page views and steadily increasing unique users internationally over 11 months. To celebrate Your Shot’s birthday in May 2020, I collaborated with National Geographic Editor-in-Chief Susan Goldberg to curate the May 17, 2019 Photos of the Week as she reflected on her experience as a journalist in selecting her favorite 15 photos.

Through monthly photography assignments, my team and I created an educational experience for our community that offered expert feedback from National Geographic editors, photographers, and invited guests. Averaging almost 28,000 total user generated submissions each month, these assignments were edited and designed into a digital story featuring 20-35 photos, also delivering editorial content for National Geographic social media platforms.

In addition to writing daily content for the Your Shot discussion forum featuring instructional and inspirational content, I participated in video webinars and planning live events offering our community the opportunity to engage with the Your Shot editorial team and receive additional educational support face-to-face.

Curated Stories

Best of 2018

My colleagues and I compiled our favorite 70 photos from 2018 from a total of over 1.2 million uploads in 2018. I curated the final 70 images from a wide edit of our individual favorites and worked with my team to organize and edit all 70 captions. Click the picture or here to see the full gallery on National Geographic.

Photos of the Week

This series was built from the daily upload edits (our pre-edits) from a week. In a day’s work, I sought to highlight images that displayed high levels of narrative, composition, and potential with a written essay reflecting the images seen in the gallery. Below is a sampling from 2019 with their social headlines. You can see the full series here and its predecessor on Tumblr here. The social titles were devised in collaboration with the National Geographic social media team with optimization of social engagement in mind.

Daily Dozen

The Daily Dozen was a curation of the previous day’s photo uploads, edited from the pre-edits (the video on the top of the page). I took over the Daily Dozen curation in January of 2019. It’s a practice in sequencing, variety, and display of a photographer’s grasp of technical and creative storytelling. To complete the Daily Dozen, I had to complete the pre-edit then compile my favorite 12 photos, essentially editing down thousands of photos to 12. The Daily Dozen was an opportunity to introduce the photo community to styles of photography in which they could garner inspiration. Here is a selection of some of my favorite Daily Dozens that I curated.

Breaking Barriers blog series

For Women’s History Month in March of 2018 I curated one photo a day from the Your Shot community to honor and celebrate the women in our community and around the globe. Each day in March the photos were shared in a Your Shot blog post and on the @natgeoyourshot Instagram titled Breaking Barriers. I chose images that celebrate female-identifying Your Shot photographers telling a visual story of empowerment, the freedom and flexibility of womanhood, photographers and their images #BreakingBarriers whether it’s identifying women’s issues in their images or a beautiful landscape or underwater image.

This project was aligned with National Geographic’s digital campaign to highlight stories of women in stories as well as storytellers.

National Geographic Photofest 2019
San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

One of my final assignments on Your Shot, “A Planet in Balance,” was co-edited with Senior Producer and best boss ever, Matt Adams. We partnered with National Geographic Explorer and photographer, Rikky Azarcoya, to develop the assignment prompting the Your Shot photo community to visualize what beauty we have to lose if the balance is lost on our planet. The final curation was exhibited in San Miguel de Allende at the 2019 Photofest. I had the unique opportunity to personally attend the festival, meet some Your Shot photographers, and see the final exhibition in person.

Live Events with Your Shot

Our team also planned, organized, and implemented special live experiences for our community, including invitation-only meet-ups at the National Gallery of Art and National Museum of the American Indian led by museum curators. We also hosted photo walks with former White House photographer Lawrence Jackson at Lafayette Square across from The White House and San Francisco Chronicle staff photographer Scott Strazzante at Pier 39 in San Francisco, California. All photos by me on my Google Pixel.