Michael Schennum grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in Art. After working as a photo editor for the now defunct dot com Excite@Home, he enrolled in Journalism classes at San Francisco State University. He interned at the Palo Alto Daily News in the summer of 2003 and at the Appleton Post-Crescent, Wisconsin in the summer of 2004 as a Chips Quinn scholar. He has won a silver in the Spot News category in the 2004 CPOY contest, and was a semi-finalist for the 2004 Hearst Photojournalism contest. His photos have appeared in US News and World Report, Golfweek's Supernews, A Magazine: Inside Asian America, the Baltimore Sun, the San Jose Mercury News, the Oakland Tribune, the Tri-Valley Herald, PDNEDU, Urbanview, and the Associated Press. He has extensively taken photographs in El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, China, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and the United States.