Bio
Lonny Shavelson is a writer, photojournalist, radio journalist and documentary filmmaker whose work has appeared in numerous publications: The New York Times, People, Family Circle, Hippocrates (now Health), Mother Jones, Der Spiegel, Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, and the Sunday newspaper magazines of the San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Chronicle, Baltimore Sun, Cleveland Plain Dealer and others. Shavelson's radio productions have aired on NPR's All Things Considered, Morning Edition and Day to Day, BBC/PRI's The World, Voice of America, Sound Medicine, Prime Time Radio and other shows nationally. His photographs are distributed by Zuma, Newscom, PictureDesk International and GlobalAware Photo.
Shavelson has produced radio reports and written and photographed stories about health care in the midst of war in Central America; needle exchange programs for drug addicts in Europe; people with mental illness in the U.S.; sharecropping and child labor in the fields of California; Southeast Asian and Central American refugees in the U.S.; the recruiting methods of young skinhead Nazis; TV evangelists vs. gays in San Francisco; towns where families have been made ill by the effects of hazardous wastes; people with terminal illnesses who are contemplating assisted suicide; drug addicts in rehab; and even about people who seek love through newspaper ads.
Shavelson is the author of six books, most recently Under the Dragon: California's New Culture, co-authored with Fred Setterberg, Heyday Books 2007), which was also an exhibit, "Trading Traditions," at the Oakland Museum of California from January to April, 2008. Shavelson's other books are Personal Ad Portraits(De Novo Press, 1983), I'm Not Crazy, I Just Lost My Glasses (De Novo Press, 1986), Toxic Nation: The Fight To Save Our Communities From Chemical Contamination, co-authored with Fred Setterberg (John Wiley & Sons, 1993), A Chosen Death: The Dying Confront Assisted Suicide (Simon & Schuster, 1995), and Hooked: Five Addicts Challenge Our Misguided Drug Rehab System (The New Press, 2001).
Shavelson was a 2005 Health Journalism Fellow at the USC Annenberg School of Communication, a 2006 Soundvision fellow in Science Journalism for radio, and the 2006 Poynter Institute/BBC/PRI training in Local-Global Reporting. He has taught documentary photography at the California College of the Arts and at Fotovision.