Staff Directory
Find staff and administrative personnel.
Winnie O’Kelley is an industry veteran known for her outstanding journalistic career as an editor on business and finance, with a specialty in economic impact and corporate wrongdoing.
She served as executive editor for Bloomberg News covering government, legal issues and financial regulation. In this role, she managed several hundred journalists around the world, overseeing news and enterprise stories at the intersection of power and business, including financial fraud, cybersecurity and privacy and health care fraud. Additionally, she was executive editor of the Washington bureau.
More recently, she created a global financial investigations team that covers everything from Russian money laundering and sanctions violations to corporate accounting shenanigans and collusion. O’Kelley is also a regular guest on Bloomberg TV, providing context and analysis on the latest financial headlines.
Prior to Bloomberg, O’Kelley worked for 20 years at The New York Times, where she held several leadership roles. She was David Kocieniewski’s editor on his Pulitzer Prize-winning series on tax avoidance, “But Nobody Pays That.” As the deputy business editor, she managed the paper’s coverage of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath.
In 2012, O’Kelley received the Lawrence Minard Editor Award, a Gerald Loeb recognition for lifetime achievement. She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University.
Sally Herships is an award winning audio journalist. Her bylines include the BBC, The New York Times and Marketplace. She’s been a frequent guest host at NPR’s daily economics podcast The Indicator and covered the pandemic and New York’s embattled Governor Andrew Cuomo for NPR’s National Desk. Her work covers a range of styles and beats and has won critical acclaim. Her 2011 investigation of the DOD’s failure to comply with its own tobacco pricing restrictions won a Third Coast Radio Impact Award and was an IRE finalist. In 2016, her BBC documentary “As Many Leaves” was described by The Guardian as an "Emotional, wonderful listen," and was rated among the year’s top ten podcasts by Vulture. In 2022, Sally hosted and co-executive produced “The Heist,” an investigative podcast series which revealed the failures of President Trump’s 2017 tax bill, racked up multiple awards and was honored as a Dupont Finalist.
Sally has been teaching for over a decade. In 2013, she founded the podcast school, Radio Boot Camp. She studied at Parsons School of Design, but in 2004, the kind folks at Radiolab took her in and taught her all things audio for which she is forever grateful.Priyanjana Bengani is the Tow Computational Journalism Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Her work focuses on using computational techniques to research the digital media landscape, including partisan local news and the intersection of platform companies with the media. She co-teaches a course on Information Warfare Reporting at Columbia Journalism School, and has previously co-taught a class on Algorithms for the Lede Program.
Her most recent projects, published in the Columbia Journalism Review,have focused on uncovering networks of mysterious ‘pink slime’ local news outlets, looking at activity on WhatsApp groups during the Indian election, and analysing how Facebook labels posts inconsistently.
Pri is a graduate of Columbia’s MS dual degree in Computer Science and Journalism (2017). She completed her BS in Computer Science and Business Studies from the University of Warwick in England.
She likes code.
Kristen Lombardi heads the Columbia Journalism School’s postgraduate reporting program, Columbia Journalism Investigations, where she has the privilege of helping produce great investigative stories while training the next generation of great investigative reporters. Under her editorial leadership, CJI fellows have dug into worker heat deaths (link is external), the mental-health toll of climate-fueled disasters (link is external) and online-dating companies’ response to sexual assaults (link is external), and CJI investigations have won accolades from the South Carolina Press Association, the Association of Health Care Journalists, the Society of Professional Journalists and the Peabody Awards.
Before joining the J-School in August 2018, Kristen spent 11 years as an investigative reporter at the nonprofit newsroom the Center for Public Integrity, covering environmental and social justice issues. She’s been a journalist (link is external) for 26 years and has received numerous national and regional awards, including the Robert F. Kennedy Award, the Dart Award, the Edward R. Murrow Award and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service. In 2013, President Barack Obama signed a law addressing problems exposed by her 2009-10 CPI investigation, “Sexual Assault on Campus (link is external).” She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and an Ochberg Fellow at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and has a master’s degree in journalism from Boston University. She’s taught investigative skills classes at Columbia and serves as a master’s adviser for students in the Stabile investigative reporting program.
Jelani Cobb joined the Journalism School faculty in 2016 and became Dean in 2022. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2015. He received a Peabody Award for his 2020 PBS Frontline film Whose Vote Counts? and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary in 2018. He has also been a political analyst for MSNBC since 2019.
He is the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obamaand theParadox of Progress and To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic. He is the editor or co-editor of several volumes including The Matter of Black Lives, a collection of The New Yorker’s writings on race and The Essential Kerner Commission Report. He is producer or co-producer on a number of documentaries including Lincoln’s Dilemma, Obama: A More Perfect Union and Policing the Police.
Dr. Cobb was educated at Jamaica High School in Queens, NY, Howard University, where he earned a B.A. in English, and Rutgers University, where he completed his MA and doctorate in American History in 2003. He is also a recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation and the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the American Journalism Project, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2023.
As the Assistant Dean of Student, Academic, and International Programs, Elena directs the Part-time Program for M.S. students and oversees a portfolio of international programs and communications. A graduate of the Part-time M.S. program, she was a staff writer at The Miami Herald. Her magazine work has appeared in VIBE, Marie Claire, Commonweal and PODER. She has also worked as an editor at Scholastic News and a staff writer at the Ford Foundation’s quarterly magazine. Elena is the faculty adviser to the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ student chapter at Columbia University. She is a member of the school’s Academic Affairs team.
Dolores Barclay is an author and former National Writer and Arts Editor of The Associated Press. She worked for AP first as a reporter covering City Hall, federal and criminal courts, and the police beat for the New York City bureau, before advancing to National Writer and investigative reporter. She later moved into culture coverage as a writer and critic and rose to manage and overhaul AP's culture beat as Arts and Entertainment editor. Her investigative series with fellow National Writer Todd Lewan, "Torn From the Land(link is external)," was a seminal work in documenting the massive loss of wealth suffered by Black Americans through land loss. The project was awarded the Aronson Prize for Social Justice Journalism, the APME Enterprise Award, and the Griot Award of the New York Association of Black Journalists and was submitted for a Pulitzer Prize. It remains a studied and much discussed work. Barclay, who has taught feature writing at Rutgers University, is the author of two inspirational books, and co-author of "A Girl Needs Cash" and "Sammy Davis Jr. My Father,” now a film project with the Emmy-winning actress/producer/writer Lena Waithe. She also worked with Diana Ross on her best-selling memoir, "Secrets of a Sparrow." A graduate of Elmira College, Barclay was honored with the Alumni Association’s Outstanding Achievement Award in 2011. She is also a recipient of The Multiple Sclerosis Award for Excellence in Communication. She is currently working on her first novel and a nonfiction account of her family’s storied history.
When not working, Barclay sails, fishes, snorkels, travels, gardens and cooks. She enjoys theater, film, music, art, dance and comic books.
Books
Believe in Yourself
Starting Over
Bruce Shapiro is Executive Director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, a project of Columbia Journalism School encouraging innovative reporting on violence, conflict and tragedy worldwide.
An award-winning reporter on human rights, criminal justice and politics, Shapiro is a contributing editor at The Nation and U.S. correspondent for Late Night Live on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National. He is also teaches ethics at Columbia Journalism School, where he is adjunct professor and Senior Advisor for Academic Affairs. His books include "Shaking the Foundations: 200 Years of Investigative Journalism in America" and "Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and America's Future."
Shapiro is recipient of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies for "outstanding and fundamental contributions to the social understanding of trauma." He is a founding board member of the Global Investigative Journalism Network.