Ty Lawson

Ty Lawson is a creative global media and education professional experienced in broadcast and digital news as well as filmmaking. He arrived at Columbia Journalism School in the Fall of 2023. Since then, he has helped reshape the City Newsroom class to reflect the current media landscape. Ty also offered a 360-reporting course to students. In addition to his teaching duties at Columbia Ty is member of a bi-coastal team collaboration made up of people from Columbia Journalism School and Stanford University’s School of Engineering that won a “Magic Grant” from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation. They are developing an AI assisted platform to analyze cross-lingual, country-specific perspectives on global news stories. He was a Summer 2024 Scholar in Residence at the Columbia Global Centers Beijing.

Ty spent two weeks in Beijing researching and engaging with fellow academics and film professionals. Prior to coming to Columbia, He was the inaugural Marion M. And John S. Stokes Visiting Professor in Race and Culture in Media at Loyola University’s School of Communication and Design. At Loyola, he spent two years developing classes that prepared journalist for the ever-changing media landscape. This included Advanced Journalism, Storytelling on Emerging Platforms and Mapping Human Trafficking which he taught to students at Loyola and Universidad Austral in Argentina. Ty has worked for national and international broadcasters ABC News' "Good Morning America”, NBC’s “3rd Hour Today”, BBC Worldwide, and CCTV’S CGTN Digital division producing innovative content. He started his career in local television news working in various markets across the nation including Chicago, Boston, and Houston.

As a filmmaker, Ty has produced more than a dozen short films that have screened at the world’s biggest film festivals including Cannes, Berlinale, and Toronto. He was selected as a Berlinale Talent in 2014. His career has taken him around the world living in New York, Beijing, Los Angeles, Hong Kong,\ Singapore, and Seoul. Ty is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts with a MFA focusing on International Media Producing.

He has served as an adjunct professor at ESRA International Film School’s (France) graduate study abroad in New York City and a guest lecturer at Universidad Austral (Argentina), Macquarie University (Australia), The University of Hong Kong, and Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Ty is a member of the Special Honors Committee for the National Association of Black Journalists, the Writers Guild of America, Ghetto Film School Roster and a former Executive Board Member, the Louisiana Professional Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.