Filmmaker and Associate Professor, Endicott College
Steve Liss was a Time Magazine staff photographer for 23 years, where, as a licensed pilot, he flew himself to and from assignments across the United States. Forty-three of his photographs have appeared on the cover of Time and he has produced dozens of award-winning photographic essays and covered six presidential campaigns for the magazine.
Liss’s work is housed in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. His book, No Place for Children: Voices from Juvenile Detention, won the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Journalism and the World Understanding Award from Pictures of the Year International. The Chicago Tribune called it “photojournalism of the most moral and galvanizing kind,” and the photographs from that project played a prominent role in the Equal Justice Initiative’s campaign to reform harsh sentencing laws for children.
Liss was the recipient of an Open Society Institute Fellowship for his work on juvenile justice and an Alicia Patterson Fellowship for his work on American poverty. He was a member of the inaugural class of fellows at the Aspen Institute’s Ascend Program, which advances a two-generation approach to poverty alleviation in the United States. Liss produced and directed the Emmy-nominated documentary short Finding Fatherhood, and the feature documentary Sacred Cod, which will premiere on the Discovery Channel in 2017.