Board of Directors
Reportage International, Inc.
Reportage International, Inc. is a nonprofit organization incorporated in Massachusetts in 2020 as the parent organization to the Social Documentary Network and ZEKE magazine. Our 501(c)(3) tax-exempt application was accepted by the IRS in March 2021. Click here for our authorization letter from the IRS. The Social Documentary Network, ZEKE magazine, and the Visual Literacy Project are projects of Reportage International.
Barbara Ayotte, Concord, MA
Secretary
Barbara Ayotte is a communications and media strategist for leading nonprofit organizations and a writer, editor and life-long human rights advocate. She currently serves as the Senior Director of Strategic Communitions at GBH, the largest producer of public media content for PBS and partner to NPR and PRX. She was the Senior Director of Strategic Communications for Management Sciences for Health, an international non-profit development organization working on global health issues in over 30 countries. Prior to that, Barbara was Director of Communications for Physicians for Human Rights and served as Communications Coordinator for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, a co-recipient of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize. Barbara has a B.A. in English from Boston College.
Dudley Brooks, Lothian, MD
Dudley M. Brooks is the Deputy Director of Photography for The Washington Post, where he manages the creative strategy and production of photo-oriented content for the Features, Local and Sports departments. Before its discontinuance in December of 2022, he was also the Photo Editor for The Washington Post Magazine.
Immediately prior to this, he was the Director of Photography and Senior Photo Editor for the monthly magazine Ebony and its weekly sister periodical Jet. These iconic publications chronicled the African American experience for nearly eight decades and Brooks was a key member of the senior staff responsible for redefining the visual prominence and editorial relevance to their national readerships.
Born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, Brooks was a graduate of Morgan State University with a degree in Fine Arts. He began his journalism career as a staff photographer for the Rockford Register Star newspaper in northern Illinois. He later joined the award-winning photography staff at The Washington Post (from 1983-2005) and quickly received numerous awards for his work as a photographer. The list of stories that he chronicled ranged widely from topics of domestic social significance to news events of international prominence.
Before returning to the Post in 2014, Brooks was the Assistant Managing Editor of Photography at The Baltimore Sun newspaper (2005-2007) and the co-creator/director of the landmark 1990 national photography project Songs of My People: African Americans – A Self-Portrait. A best-selling book (published by Little-Brown) and combined with an internationally traveled exhibition by the Smithsonian Institutes Travelling Exhibition Service (SITES), this enlightening project showcased newly commissioned work by 53 African American photographers. It was widely celebrated for documenting the everyday aspects of Black culture.
In 2003, he created and co-directed Imagenes Havana. This comprehensive workshop in Havana, Cuba included a five-day exhibition that displayed the work of 25 international photographers. It was supplemented by three days of roundtable forums that addressed the difficulties of documenting the international community, opportunities in photo book publishing, and ethical issues facing working photographer from a global perspective.
Brooks is an active participant in professional photography seminars and workshops globally and has been an advisor to the leadership of Addis Foto Fest in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It exhibits and curates the work of photographers throughout the African diaspora. He also served as the national chairman for the 2021 National Press Photographers Association’s Best of Photojournalism contest.
John Heffernan, Washington, DC
John Heffernan has over three decades of experience in non-profit leadership roles on five continents. He is currently the president of the Foundation for Systemic Change. Previously he served as: Executive Director for Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights’ Speak Truth To Power (STTP), the Director of the Genocide Prevention Initiative at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum where he established the Genocide Prevention Task Force, Senior Investigator with Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) where he led three investigations to Darfur, Sudan and Afghanistan where he discovered a mass grave, and was the Chief of Party for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs in Guyana, South America. He was the founding Executive Director of the DC-based Coalition for International Justice and served as Country Representative for the former Yugoslavia for the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and managed IRC’s refugee resettlement program in Khartoum, Sudan. John also served as the Vice President of the Business Council for the United Nations in New York City. He was a Coro fellow in San Francisco and has a Master’s from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and BA from UCSB. He is the board chair for Disability Rights International and is on the boards of the Dodd Center for Human Rights and the Educator’s Institute for Human Rights.
Eric Luden, Cambridge, MA
Treasurer
Eric Luden has been surrounded by art and photography all his life. After graduating from Boston College, Eric worked in the professional retail photo industry as well as a commercial and fine art photographer. In the 1990s, he served as a consultant to Eastman Kodak’s education division and later joined Ilford Photo where he worked for the next 13 years. At Ilford he gained a profound knowledge of photographic processes, photography labs and the needs of the photographic community. When he left Ilford, he was VP of Marketing for Ilford’s parent company, HARMAN Technology.
In 2008, Eric left Ilford to start his own company, Digital Silver Imaging (DSI), in Belmont, MA. Over the past 11 years, the lab has grown and earned an international reputation as a fine art printing company. During that time, Eric has worked with many noted photographers, galleries, museums, and institutions. Digital Silver Imaging has been a sponsor for Look3, Photoville, Palm Springs Photography Workshops and the New England Portfolio Reviews.
In 2015, Eric began a partnership with Photoville that continues to grow each year. DSI has collaborated with SDN and numerous artists, including VII Foundation, Blue Earth Alliance, Catchlight, MFON and many others to help bring their exhibitions to life during this two week festival in Brooklyn. Eric continues to support many areas of documentary photography. DSI has been the host for SDN’s “Documentary Matters” series of presentations since the program was founded in 2016.
In addition to DSI, Eric serves on the Board of Directors at the Griffin Museum of Photography and is a member of the advisory committees at Lesley University College of Art & Design and at New England School of Photography. He lives in Cambridge, MA with his wife, J. Sybylla Smith, an independent photo curator and consultant.
Glenn Ruga, Concord, MA
President
Glenn Ruga is a photographer, graphic designer and curator. He founded the Social Documentary Network (SDN) in 2008 as a web platform for a global community of documentary photographers to present their work online. As a photographer, he has created traveling and online documentary exhibits on the struggle for a multicultural future in Bosnia, the war and aftermath in Kosovo, and on an immigrant community in Holyoke, Mass.
In 2015, Ruga launched ZEKE: The Magazine of Global Documentary, a print and digital magazine presenting the best stories from the Social Documentary Network.
From 2010-2013, Ruga was the Executive Director of the Photographic Resource Center (PRC) at Boston University. He curated numerous exhibitions while at the PRC including "Global Health in Focus" featuring work by Kristen Ashburn, Dominic Chavez, and David Rochkind. Ruga is also the former Publisher and Art Director of Loupe, the magazine of the PRC.
From 1993 through 2009, Ruga was the founder and president of the Center for Balkan Development, a non-profit organization established to help stop the genocide in Bosnia and create a just and sustainable future in the former Yugoslavia.
Glenn has a B.A. in Social Theory from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and a MFA in Graphic and Advertising Design from Syracuse University.
Maggie Soladay, Woodside, NY
Maggie Soladay is Senior Photography Editor at the Open Society Foundations in New York. Her work with OSF involves addressing racial, economic, and political justice issues around the world through photography. Soladay is always looking to work with photographers who explore human rights issues. She has been working in the photography industry for over 25 years.
