Aviation Week’s 2023 Photo Contest Judges

With backgrounds in photography, journalism, art and design, our judges bring an appreciation for aesthetics and love of aviation. 

Photo Contest Director

Michael O. Lavitt is director of editorial content production for the Aviation Week Network. He guided the transition of the contest to digital photography and online submission, which quadrupled entries and drew a more international field. He joined Aviation Week in 1988 as a news editor and played a key role in the organization’s transition to a multimedia provider of aerospace news, analysis, data and intelligence.

The Judges

Dana Bell has written 35 books on aviation history and is a full-time author after a 30-year career with the U.S. government. Starting as a photo researcher with the U.S. Air Force in 1976, he moved to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington in 1982. He now writes specialized technical histories about organizations, colors and markings, and individual aircraft. His latest title is Painting the Fleet: Interwar Battleship and Cruiser Aviation.

Larry Grace started his professional career as a U.S. Air Force air traffic controller. Grace has been an aviation photographer since 1970, shooting at more than 150 air shows and conducting air-to-air shoots on a variety of platforms. He also shoots at corporate events and for advertising and real estate assignments, as well as portraits. Grace has belonged to the International Society for Aviation Photography since 2004 and has been president since 2011. He has been an instructor in the media studies program of the Edina Art Center in Edina, Minnesota, and is a member of Kelby One. Grace was recognized as the Minnesota Aviation Hall of Fame Artist of the Year in 2019.

Mitchell Koppelman has been a professional news photographer, editor and manager for more than 40 years. After a decade with United Press International, he joined Gannett as the founding director of photography for USA Today. In 1984, he moved to Reuters as a founder of the Reuters News Pictures Service, serving as assistant news pictures editor for North America. Koppelman helped develop Reuters’ online global news photo service, the first web-based digital picture and video archives, and directed development and deployment of the first digital broadcast satellite delivery of still photos in the Americas. He retired from Reuters at the end of 2020.

Lisa Caputo, Aviation Week’s award-winning director of content design, has worked at the magazine since 1990. Her responsibilities have evolved to in­clude digital as well as print design. Previously, she worked as a graphic artist at Business Week and as a layout artist at Time magazine. Caputo graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.

Thomas DePierro, in addition to being a member of the Aviation Week & Space Technology art department for more than four years, is a fine photographer in his own right, specializing in street scenes with people as well as public space interiors.