About

Photo by Leila Navidi

Evelio Contreras began shooting video for newspapers on the morning of the Virginia Tech shootings.

As a reporter for The Roanoke Times, Evelio worked with his newsroom mentor Seth Gitner to produce multimedia covering the tragedy on campus. Evelio continues to shoot video and has won first and second place awards in the past three NPPA’s Best of Photojournalism contest. His work on the One Year Later video portraits at Virginia Tech contributed to The Roanoke Times earning a silver medal from the Society for News Design.

Evelio enjoys telling visual stories. Whether it’s through text, photography or video, he believes the principles of storytelling remain the same. He has been a video journalist at the Las Vegas Sun and a sports, news reporter and multimedia producer at The Roanoke Times. He is currently producing original video series content for The Washington Post and working on personal projects for mobile devices.

Previously, he worked at The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer as a desk assistant and was a reporter at The News Gram, a bilingual newspaper in his hometown of Eagle Pass, Texas.