Elon University School of Communications senior lecturer Randy Piland was one of two higher education instructors honored with the Robin F. Garland Educator Award from the National Press Photographers Association.
The award is given to those who exhibit outstanding service as a photojournalism educator. Piland has taught at Elon since 2005, leading several courses in photojournalism, visual storytelling and corporate publishing. He’s also led Interactive Media master’s students on Winter Term fly-in experiences, including one to Cuba in January.
Piland boasts 30 years experience as a photojournalist at four newspapers in Georgia, Massachusetts and Tennessee. For 13 of those years he served as picture editor and senior photographer at The Tennessean in Nashville. He was named Elon University’s first Faculty Fellow of Technology in 2010, a position he held for two years.
The award is named in honor of Bob Garland, who, according to NPPA, “was a picture editor and war correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post until he joined Graflex Inc. as press technical representative after World War II. Later he became a press photography products specialist for Eastman Kodak Co. He died in December 1972.”
An instructor from Syracuse University is the other winner of this year’s Garland award.