Most recently Mahon was a winner of American Photography 30, Magenta Foundation's Flash Forward- Emerging Photographers (2009), a finalist for the International Reporting Project Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, and a grant recipient of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting for his work in Somaliland. He holds a Master's degree in Photojournalism from Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications, and as a Bachelor's degree in International Studies from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.