Quick Facts
Biography
Santiago Lyon is Director of Editorial Content at Adobe where he oversees their photojournalism offering to Adobe customers. From 2003 to 2016 he was Vice President and Director of Photography of The Associated Press responsible for the AP's global photo report and the photographers and photo editors around the world who produce it. From 1984 to 2003 he was a photographer and photo editor.
Biography and career
Born in Madrid, Spain to American parents, Lyon has 34 years of experience in news-service photography and has won multiple photojournalism awards for his coverage of conflicts around the globe - including two World Press Photo prizes and the Bayeux prize for war photography.
He covered the end of the civil war in El Salvador, the U.S. invasion of Panama, the first Gulf War, the Balkan wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, the civil war in Somalia and the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan among other major news and sports stories around the world.
A selection of his work can be seen here: https://spark.adobe.com/page/WDjh76m3quNET/
He joined the Associated Press in 1991 in Cairo after previously having worked for the Spanish news agency EFE, United Press International and Reuters.
Lyon served as the Associated Press photo editor for Spain and Portugal from 1995 until 2003, when he was named director of photography.In the same year, he was a Nieman Fellow in journalism at Harvard University.
Under his direction the AP won three Pulitzer Prizes for photography as well as numerous other major photojournalism awards around the world.
In 2005 the Associated Press earned its 29th Pulitzer Prize for photography, for work on the war in Iraq by a team of eleven photographers, five of them Iraqis.
In 2007, the Associated Press won its 30th Pulitzer Prize for photography, for a single image made by Oded Balilty.
In 2013 the AP won its 31st Pulitzer Prize for photography for work on the civil war in Syria by five photographers, Rodrigo Abd, Manu Brabo, Narciso Contreras, Khalil Hamra and Muhammed Muheisen.
Lyon was part of a small team of AP executives who traveled repeatedly to North Korea to negotiate the successful opening of an AP bureau in Pyongyang.
Lyon serves on the Board of Directors of the Eddie Adams Workshop, the VII Foundation and RISC, a journalism safety organization. He teaches regularly at the International Center of Photography in New York.
He was Chair of the Jury for the 2013 World Press Photo contest.
In 2012 he was a Sulzberger Fellow at Columbia University in New York, studying ways to enhance the value of the AP's photo output to better serve growing customer segments.
In late 2016 he left the AP, joining Adobe in September 2017 as their first director of editorial content a position tasked with developing and growing Adobe's photojournalism offering to its customers.
He is married to Emma Daly, Communications Director at Human Rights Watch. They live in New York City with their daughter and son.