David Leeson

In 2008, Leeson decided to accept a buy-out offer and leave The Dallas Morning News, as part of an A. H. Belo Corporation cost-cutting measure involving buyouts of more than 400 journalists. He planned to continue in freelance photojournalism and documentary film work.

Before his 2004 win, Leeson had been a finalist for the Pulitzer three times — twice individually and once as member of a team — in feature photography (1986), explanatory journalism (1990, as part of the newspaper staff), and spot news photography (1995).

Leeson has been married since April 17, 2000, to former Dallas Morning News photographer Kim Ritzenthaler, with whom he has two children. He also has three children from a previous marriage, which ended in 1998.

Leeson was a finalist for the Pulitzer a second time, in 1994, for a photograph of a family fleeing floodwaters in southeast Texas, a picture that also won him a Texas Headliner Award.

While photographing protesters during the buildup to the ousting of Manuel Noriega in 1988, Leeson was wounded when a shotgun pellet entered his cheek, chipping his tooth and sending him to a Panama City emergency room.

Since joining the staff of The Dallas Morning News in 1984, Leeson has covered local and regional news and issues, such as homelessness and natural disasters; national stories on death row inmates across the United States; international conflicts in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Sudan, Angola, Kuwait and Iraq in the first and second Gulf wars; earthquakes in Turkey; and apartheid in South Africa. His 1985 series on homelessness earned him a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, an honor he received again in 1994 for his coverage of the civil war in Angola. The year 1985 also saw his first Pulitzer nomination, for coverage of apartheid in South Africa; he returned twice to that nation, the last time in 1994, when he recorded the historic event of South Africa's first non-racial presidential elections.

Leeson is a 1978 graduate of Abilene Christian University, where he received a degree in journalism and mass communication. While still in college, he was on the staff of the Abilene Reporter-News, where he began in 1977 and stayed until 1982. He left Abilene for New Orleans, Louisiana, where he was on the staff of The Times-Picayune from 1982 to 1984.

David Leeson (born October 18, 1957, in Abilene, Texas) was a staff photographer for The Dallas Morning News. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography in 2004, together with Cheryl Diaz Meyer, for coverage of the Iraq War. He also received the RTNDA Edward R. Murrow Award, the National Headliner Award, and a regional Emmy Award in 2004 for his work as executive producer and photographer for the WFAA-TV documentary "War Stories."