Alumni Achievement Award

Renée Jones Schneider ’01 has been a multimedia photographer at the Minneapolis Star Tribune since 2003. Her long-term projects, shooting both video and stills, include stories examining why so few rape and sexual assault victims in Minnesota get justice, farming deaths, radicalization, the decline of honeybees, and Minnesota’s broken special education system. She was named Journalist of the Year in 2016 in the Society of Professional Journalist Minnesota Chapter, won several Upper Midwest Emmys, and received a World Press Award in 2004. Her work on the story “Denied Justice” was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Local News, and she was part of the Star Tribune’s 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for coverage of the murder of George Floyd and its aftermath. She majored in studio art at St. Olaf.