Faculty

Lee Banville joined the University of Montana faculty after more than 13 years at the Online NewsHour, the multiple award-winning companion Web site to the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He joined the NewsHour in October 1995 -- when new media was actually still new -- as one of the three founding editors of the Web site. He became the managing editor in 1997 and took over complete operations in October of 1998. 

Denise Dowling joined the broadcast faculty in 2000, after 20 award-winning years working in television and radio newsrooms. In 2004 she was named the country’s most promising journalism professor and in 2009 was selected as UM’s CASE professor of the year.

Ray Ekness has worked at The University of Montana since 1989. He began as a television producer at the UM Broadcast Media Center (then known as the Telecommunications Center) and an adjunct instructor. He began working as an assistant professor of Radio-Television in the School of Journalism in 1998. He was named department chair and promoted to associate professor in 2004.

Ray Fanning joined the School of Journalism’s Radio-Television Department in 2007, after teaching broadcast journalism courses at Columbia College Chicago. Before he started teaching, Fanning spent more than 17 years working in local television news at KBMY in Bismarck, KTVB in Boise, KUTV in Salt Lake City and KGW in Portland.

Keith grew up in Mississippi during the 1960s. One year his parents went on vacation and returned with a 35mm camera. Keith started shooting cars, the business his father worked in all his life. He's been hooked ever since. He studied photojournalism at the University of Missouri, then got an internship with The Miami Herald, which led to a job offer the following year. It was exciting. The Cuban boatlift, riots on the streets of Liberty City, drug trials, the Miami Dolphins, University of Miami sports, Little Havana and Little Haiti made for a photojournalist's dream.

Chris Jones, Esquire magazine writer-at-large, is our 2009 T. Anthony Pollner Distinguished Professor. He won the National Magazine Award for his story "Home," about three astronauts stranded on the space station when the shuttle Columbia exploded, and is a finalist for this year's National Magazine Award in Feature Writing for his story "The Things That Carried Him," about the return of the body of a dead soldier from Iraq. His work has appeared in Best American Magazine Writing and Best American Sports Writing.

Peggy Kuhr joined the School of Journalism as dean in August 2007. Before that, she was Knight Chair on the Press, Leadership and Community at The University of Kansas. While at KU, she and Richard Harwood of The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation developed a Web site featuring community journalism tools, training and insights into how communities work.

Henriette Löwisch is an international journalist who has worked across continents and media. After serving as the 2006 Pollner Professor, she returned to Missoula in 2009, to join the J-School's full-time faculty and direct its graduate program.

Jeremy Lurgio is a freelance photojournalist and documentary photographer based in Missoula. His photography is driven by a passion for documenting people, places and stories. A native of New Hampshire, Lurgio received his undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He began his study of documentary photography at the Salt School for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine.

Dennis Swibold teaches the school's Public Affairs Reporting and News Editing courses most frequently. He also teaches the school's Investigations course, leads the school's Graduate Projects Seminar, and oversees the Community News Service, which provides Montana's weekly and smaller dailies with student-produced coverage of statewide elections, biennial legislative sessions and other issues of interest.

Carol Van Valkenburg, who heads the Department of Print Journalism, has worked at the J-School for more than 25 years. Carol earned her B.A. from UM in 1972 and worked 10 years at the Missoulian as a reporter, copy editor and editorial writer.

Nadia White chafed at being assigned weather stories when she was a reporter in
places where winter weather seemed so routine: Maine, Minnesota,
Wyoming, Colorado. Once she became an editor in Wyoming, however, she
assigned those stories with enthusiasm. In journalism, as in life, your
view depends on where you sit.

Clem Work came to UM in 1990 from U.S. News & World Report,where he was a senior editor. Before that, he was deputy director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Washington, D.C. He began his journalism career working for daily newspapers in the late 1960s in Southern California and in Denver, and obtained a law degree in 1975.