Michael DeMocker is a photographer, videographer and drone pilot for NASA, working out of the NASA Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans where he documents the Artemis program that is returning astronauts to the moon in 2026. He is certified as a UAS pilot by the FAA and NASA, as a Level 1 UAS Infrared Thermographer by the ITC, and a SCUBA Divemaster by the Professional Association of Dive Instructors .
He is also entering his sixth season as a senior photographer and videographer in the National Football League's LCC program covering the New Orleans Saints, the team he has photographed for over twenty-five seasons. He has been honored three times by the NFL in their annual action and feature photography contest. His photo of the 2006 Steve Gleason blocked punt is considered one of the most iconic images in New Orleans sports history and is the basis for a statue outside the Superdome. He has photographed multiple Super Bowls, AFC and NFC championships, NCAA Final Fours, Sugar Bowls and College Football Championships.
A native of Rochester, New York, DeMocker graduated from the Boston University College of Communications with a Bachelor of Science in Broadcasting & Film. He began working for the Times-Picayune newspaper in 1996 as a freelancer and joined the staff full-time in 2002. Before that, he was a photographer for Tulane University, a medical and surgical photographer at LSU Medical Center, and an underwater photographer working in the Florida Keys, the Caribbean and Central America.
As a staff photographer for the Times-Picayune from 1996 to 2019, DeMocker won one Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina and was a finalist for another in 2008 for “Homicide 37.” He has been the National Press Photographer Association’s Regional Photographer of the Year three times, won the Associated Press Managing Editor’s C.P. Liter Award four times and received the 2012 Sigma Delta Chi award for top breaking news photo in the country. He was embedded on combat patrols in Baghdad, Iraq in 2005 and was in the eye of Hurricane Katrina later that year.
DeMocker travels extensively and is the author of seventeen non-fiction books for children. He lives in New Orleans with his wife and two dogs of questionable intelligence.