Aj Chavar

About Aj Chavar

Award-winning visual journalist skilled in spatial storytelling, photography, and cinematography. Exploring and explaining emerging technologies in the pursuit of journalism. I want to make people care about the world around them through storytelling. Proven expertise in making effective use cases for interactive storytelling to executive stakeholders and organizational leadership. Adept at cross-functional leadership, project management, large-scale presentations, story editing, visual story production, guiding creative processes, and developing visual guidelines. Trusted advisor in editorial, product, engineering and advertising spaces.

Experience

1. Creative & Production Technologist

   The New York Times

   Dec 2019 — Present · NY, US

   Researching and experimenting with Gaussian Splatting for spatial storytelling, aiding in the development of workflows for integrating splatting into our journalism from field capture to web delivery.(The output of this work was presented as part of a panel at SIGGRAPH 2025.)- Working across diverse projects involving wide-ranging technologies, including the production and delivery of interactive live-streaming video, repeatable capture patterns and workflows for 3D portraiture using NeRF, Gaussian Splatting, visual semantic search, UI and UX for mixed reality, field data transmission for photo and video journalists, computer vision, photogrammetry, natural language processing, and augmented reality- Developing an internal human LLM evaluation workflow to create and vet a golden data set of over cases with up to 20 variables each, and overseeing its execution by a team of a dozen human evaluators, ultimately helping deliver millions of cases at greater than 99% accuracy-Conducting research, wire framing, and ultimately overseeing the redesign and deployments to our in-house mobile field transmission app for photojournalists, called Beam. Project-managed a remote team that engineered and deployed the new functionality-Writing and updating documentation, hosting training sessions for dozens of employees, and troubleshooting real-time filing issues globally for our network of thousands of visual journalists until Beam was integrated into internal newsroom products-Creating the overall visual voice of the R&D department, producing video content across rd.nytimes.com, writing and editing copy, providing creative feedback to internal and freelance designers and developers.

Education

• Syracuse University

  Photojournalism, Information Studies, Religion

  2005 — 2010

Skills

• Breaking News
• Photography
• Producing
• Blogging
• Photojournalism
• Editing
• Journalism
• Hd Video
• Photoshop
• Editorial
• Final Cut Pro
• Video Editing
• New Media
• Newspapers
• Dreamweaver
• Adobe Creative Suite
• Storytelling
• Video
• Film
• Indesign
• Videography
• Documentaries
• Multimedia