He has over thirty years of experience in news-service photography and has won multiple photojournalism awards for his coverage of conflicts around the globe.
He covered the end of the civil war in El Salvador; the U.S. invasion of Panama; the first Gulf War; the Balkan wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo; the civil war in Somalia and the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, among other major news and sports stories around the world.
He joined the Associated Press (AP) in 1991 in Cairo after previously having worked for the Spanish news agency EFE, United Press International and Reuters.
Lyon served as the AP photo editor for Spain and Portugal from 1995 until 2003, when he became a Nieman fellow at Harvard University. That same year he was named director of photography at the AP, a position he held until 2016.
Under his direction the AP won three Pulitzer Prizes for photography as well as numerous other major photojournalism awards around the world.
Lyon serves on the Board of Directors of the Eddie Adams Workshop and is a regular participant at the yearly tuition-free workshop in upstate New York. He also teaches regularly at the International Center of Photography in New York.
He was a member of the Board of Directors of the Overseas Press Club in New York and chaired its photo contest jury in 2010 and 2011.
Lyon taught at the 2010 Joop Swart Masterclass organized by the World Press Photo Foundation and was Chair of the Jury for the 2013 World Press Photo contest.
In 2012 he was a Sulzberger Fellow at Columbia University in New York, studying ways to enhance the value of the AP's photo output to better serve growing customer segments.
