Information, Communication and Media Specialist

BIOGRAPHYG e o r g e L e s s a r d

George Lessard is trained and has experience in the media skills of journalism, desktop publishing, photography, radio & TV production, computer graphics, educational audio-visuals, and web-based & social media. He works in English and his mother tongue, French.

He mentored the “Through Young Eyes” digital photography workshop for young photographers in Fort Laird NWT under the auspices of The Frozen Eyes Photographic Society funded by the Hamlet of Fort Laird, BHP-Billiton and the NWT Arts Council.

He was photo editor for Northern News Services Limited in Yellowknife, NWT where he edited all the editorial photography for this publisher's six newspapers.

He worked in Arviat, Nunavut as a Media Specialist for the Nunavut Department of Education in Arviat, Nunavut; in China as a copy editor & polisher for the China Daily group of publications; Bolivia as a broadcasting consultant; taught photojournalism, electronic news gathering, small group communications and business communications at the College of the Bahamas in Nassau, the Bahamas; presented at the Annenberg School for

Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, USA; managed the audio - visual workshop facilities of Vanier College's Snowdon Campus and the campus photographic darkroom; was the February 1988 Artist-in-Residence ft the Visual Studies Workshop of Rochester, New York funded both by the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Endowment for the Arts.

His YouTube videos have 114,225 Lifetime Views as of Monday, 11 February, 2013. His digital images on Flickr have been see over 980,000 times and selected images have been exhibited in Tokyo, Japan; Madrid, Spain; Leicester, England; Brooklyn, NY, USA; San Francisco California, USA; Atlanta, Georgia, USA; Seattle, Washington, USA; New York, NY, USA; Winnipeg, Manitoba,

Canada; Montreal, Quebec, Canada; Yorkton, Saskatchewan, Canada.

He has presented digital imaging workshops as a visiting artist in Vancouver, Banff, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal, Inuvik and Rochester N.Y.; New Delhi & Orissa, India; Butare, Rwanda; Chelyabinsk, Russia and Yellowknife, NWT, Canada.

Information, Communication and Media Specialist

Member of the National Board - Canada Without PovertyMember of the Board - Northern Arts and Cultural Centre - Yellowknife NTFormer VP - The John Howard Society of the Northwest Territories;

Member of the Yellowknife Community Justice Committee;

Former Member of the board - The Frozen Eyes Photographic Society of the Northwest Territories;

Former member of the boards of; l’Association Franco-culturelle de

Yellowknife (AFCY); Aurora Arts Society; l’Association des francophones de Fort Smith; The Artists of the South Slave Society; Former President, Local 09 (Arviat) Nunavut Employees Union; Arviat Library & Internet Society.

As a freelance media consultant and trainer, George's contracts have included:

•Advising the Photo Studio of Yudin Andrey Nikolaevich in Chelyabinsk, Russia on studio management, hardware, web presence and international marketing.•Creating and delivering a series of

workshops on Photoshop, PowerPoint & MS Publisher for the Conseil de développement économique des TNO (CDETNO) in Yellowknife & Hay River, NWT; •Mentoring young photographers for

the 2008 Arctic Winter Games in Yellowknife, NWT; •Consulting on broadcast

programming & training for Radio Illimani, the Bolivian national radio network in La Paz, Bolivia; •Training in Digital Journalism for

Media Action International at the

National University of Rwanda, Butare as part of a UNESCO journalism training project; •Documenting the work of a rural

Indian NGO in Orissa, India, whose over 200 staff members and field workers who worked with the “tribals” of Orissa on housing, health, sanitation and income generation projects.

In north he was in Canada's western Arctic teaching a short course in basic video production at Arctic College, Inuvik Northwest Territories and was also contracted, for 12 months to teach all aspects of television production and facility management at the Inuvialuit Communications Society.

Earlier to his work in the NWT, he was contracted to Taqramiut Nipingat Inc. of Salluit, Nunavik (Quebec) an Inuit owned and operated broadcast centre as a radio / TV production & management trainer where he taught all aspects of media production, scripting, construction and content & management.

George works with many PC and MAC programs including Quark, Photoshop, InDesign, Final Cut, Acrobat Pro, MS Word, Publisher, PowerPoint and a host of others.

“Deh Cho Drum” year in review issue of 2007 montage George created for

Northern News Service.

VOLUNTEER COMMUNITY WORK

The Award of Excellence, from the 10th TOKYO VIDEO FESTIVAL

for George’s dramatic narrative video RUMBLESPHINX

January, from the Traditional Inuit Calendar George designed in for the Education Nunavut in

Inuktitut, Inuinnaqtun, English and French.

451 Norseman Dr., Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, X1A 2J1, CanadaE-mail: mediamentor@gmail.com Cell: (867) 445-9193