Susie Post-Rust

As a documentary photographer, Susie Post-Rust’s work explores place, community, and connections within changing social landscapes. After working in more than 20 countries on four continents, she is now exploring her home state of North Carolina, looking for the universal threads that hold our communities together.

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Susie Post-Rust is a documentary photographer and educator whose work centers on long-form storytelling and deep engagement with communities. She first discovered documentary photography while taking a college course that required a full semester spent documenting a single community—an experience that reshaped her understanding of photography as a collaborative, listening-based practice.

Over the next two decades, Susie worked as a magazine and newspaper photojournalist in more than twenty countries across Africa, Europe, South America, Central America, and North America. For more than ten years, she worked primarily with the National Geographic Society in both the magazine and book divisions, and her work has also appeared in Life, People, U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, and The New York Times. She has devoted significant time to nonprofit work as well, collaborating with organizations including World Vision, Food for the Hungry, Compassion International, and the North Carolina Food Bank.

Susie’s career has always combined professional practice with teaching and mentorship. She has taught documentary photography at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies since 2003, where she is a Lecturing Fellow. Her teaching closely aligns with her documentary practice, emphasizing service-learning and community-based storytelling. Students work beyond campus boundaries, using photography as a way to build relationships and understand the responsibilities that come with representation. She has also taught at Western Kentucky University and has been part of the Missouri Photo Workshop and WKU’s Mountain Workshops.

Her work has been recognized with numerous honors, including the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for Coverage of the Disadvantaged and multiple awards from the Pictures of the Year competition.

Currently, Susie is working on a long-term project named Main Street NC. Highway 70 runs straight across North Carolina, starting in a small town named Atlantic to the Tennessee border. In a time of increasing division, the project looks closely at life along this corridor, seeking moments of connection and shared experience that might help bridge the widening gap in our communities.