We’re thrilled to announce two new hires at The Texas Tribune — our first staff photographer and an exciting addition to our engineering team.

Miguel Gutierrez Jr. is — starting today — our photographer/photo editor. He and his camera will be a steady presence at the Texas Capitol during the upcoming legislative session. He’ll also oversee our photography operation, thinking strategically about how to tell visually rich stories about Texas government and politics with the help of our network of talented freelance photographers across the state.

Gutierrez, an Illinois native who is fluent in Spanish, comes to us from New York, where he has been working as a multimedia producer for the state attorney general’s office. But he knows Texas well. He received two master’s degrees from the University of Texas at Austin — in journalism and Latin American studies — and worked as a multimedia producer at KUT. Gutierrez has a bachelor’s degree in Latin American and Latino studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has also worked in film production in Los Angeles.

Ashley Hebler will join our engineering team as a front-end engineer. In that role, she’ll bring new editorial and design ideas to life on our pages, while continuously improving our site’s speed, security and usability.

Hebler joins us from Cox Media Group, a company of newspapers, radio and TV stations and digital media. Based in Austin, she led a team of developers building sites and establishing design systems across Cox sites such as rare.us. Previously, she was a developer at Volusion, an Austin-based e-commerce platform.

She has also taught web design and publishing at Texas State University, from which she received a master’s in mass communication with a focus on new media. A native of Galveston, Hebler holds a bachelor’s in agricultural economics from Texas A&M University. She starts at the Tribune in January.