Photojournalism scholarships help master’s students earn their degrees with hands-on projects
Four master’s students at the Missouri School of Journalism will receive support in the Spring 2026 semester to help them complete photojournalism projects and theses to earn their degrees. Funds from the C. Zoe Smith Photojournalism Scholarship will help cover costs for travel and production of their final works.
Austin Johnson and Yong Li Xuan will each receive $1,000 for travel to support their professional projects. Russ Bray and Saf Khodieva will also receive $300 and $700, respectively.
Johnson’s project will focus on photojournalists and how they handle the stresses of documenting emotionally taxing and sometimes dangerous assignments. In addition to interviewing photographers, Johnson will photograph photojournalists as they cover activities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in an American city.
“The photo essay will include my own photo documentation of this situation as well as the daily grind and struggle a professional photojournalist may encounter while covering such a mentally and physically taxing assignment,” Johnson said, adding that the scholarship funds would cover housing expenses during his time in the field.
Li Xuan’s project, “Trust and agency in visual storytelling: building trust and giving agency to subjects in visual stories about childbirth,” will feature a photographic documentation illustrating the joys and struggles of pregnancies and childbirth, why some women turn to certified nurse midwives instead of obstetrician gynecologists in hospitals and how midwives provide care for their clients. It also will incorporate interviews with photojournalists who have completed long-term projects on similar topics to explore how they build trust with the people they are photographing.
“The project will culminate in a photo book, which I will print with the help of this scholarship,” Li Xuan said.
Russ Bray’s project will be completed in Columbia. Titled “Depending on America,” the project will showcase challenges to surviving close to the poverty level. Bray’s project will be a collaboration with a local family that is part of the working class. The photos created as part of this project will be made with the hope to humanize statistics by delving into a family’s routines and interactions throughout their daily lives.
“With these funds, I have the opportunity to also make this project into something physical,” Bray said. “I plan to use the money to print around 50 magazines, which gives me the opportunity to use this project as an incredible experience in photo editing for a print edition of my work.”
Bray will receive $300 to offset costs to print the magazines.
Saf Khodieva’s master’s thesis will examine how the Russian media outlet RIA Novosti constructed ideology through its use of visual content in the first year of the Ukraine War. As foundational research for the project, Khodieva will use archives to situate the visual analysis within a larger historical context.
“I plan to travel to Washington, D.C., primarily to consult relevant holdings at the Library of Congress and related U.S. collections that include Soviet and Cold War–era visual materials not available online,” Khodieva said. “These materials will help me trace visual continuities, refine my ideological framework, and strengthen the semiotic analysis.”
Khodieva is receiving $700 to offset the costs of travel for the archival research.
About the C. Zoe Smith Photojournalism Scholarship
The C. Zoe Smith Photojournalism Scholarship was established in 2015 by School of Journalism professor emerita C. Zoe Smith. The funding from the scholarship helps students cover travel and other research costs as they work on the thesis or professional project required for graduation.
Updated: February 3, 2026