Randy Piland
Elon University
Staff
Randy Piland teaches photojournalism and design classes at Elon University in North Carolina. With nearly 30 years as a photojournalist, Piland worked at The Tennessean, in Nashville, for 13 years as a picture editor and later as senior photographer.
In 2003, he completed his undergraduate degree in Digital Media Communication at Middle Tennessee State University and earned a master’s in Visual Communications from Ohio University in 2005.
Prior to Nashville, Piland worked as a picture editor, assistant chief photographer, and staff photographer at three newspapers in Georgia and Massachusetts. He paralleled eight of his newspaper years as an Army photojournalist while serving in an Army Reserves public affairs unit. During this time, he traveled with the Army on assignments both in the U. S. and abroad including his activation to Desert Storm during the first Gulf War.
During his career, he has participated in numerous workshops including Visual Edge at the Poynter Institute, the first Stan Kalish Picture Editing Workshop, the first Multimedia Boot camp at the University of North Carolina, the Missouri Photo Workshop and several others. He was a photo coach at the Eighth Electronic Photojournalism Workshop.
Piland lives in Burlington, N.C., with his wife, Debbie, and their two children, Sierra and Baden.
