Jim MacMillan is the founder and director of the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting and its parent organization, the Initiative for Better Gun Violence Reporting, which he launched during his residential fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri.
Previously, MacMillan was the Journalist in Residence at Swarthmore College, a Fellow with Philadelphia Social Innovations Lab at the University of Pennsylvania and a Practitioner in Residence at the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University.
He was also an Ochberg Fellow with the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University and the Knight Fellow in Medicine/Health Sciences Journalism with the Knight-Wallace Fellows at the University of Michigan.
Previous faculty appointments include the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Swarthmore College, New York University’s Carter Journalism Institute and Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University. He has created and taught courses in Peace Journalism, Solutions Journalism and Trauma Journalism.
During his prior photojournalism career, MacMillan spent 17 years at the Philadelphia Daily News and worked for The Associated Press in Boston and in Baghdad during the war in Iraq, after which his team was awarded The Pulitzer Prize.
Jim was a superb Institute Scholar/Practitioner in Residence INSPIRE Fellow, providing our students with superb professional insights, and thoughtful portfolio critique. He critically provided them an ethical, unpretentious role model.
While he revealed his extraordinary international experience, he also led our students in unique photographic initiatives in U.S. cities, uniquely a workshop on the impact of gun violence in his city, Philadelphia.
Jim taught them sophisticated photographic techniques, enabled them to understand the business aspect of becoming a professional photographer, the impact of the digital era, and what it would mean for a photographer to become an independent, skilled, integrated multimedia story teller. He was humane, sensitive, and thoughtful about the unique pressures of photographing in conflict and war zones.