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  • 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.

  • Walt Bogdanich is the Pulitzer-Prize winning assistant editor for The New York Times Investigations Desk. Before joining The Times in 2001, he was an investigative producer for “60 Minutes” on CBS and before that for ABC News. Previously, he worked as an investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal in New York and Washington. Mr. Bogdanich graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1975 with a degree in political science. He received his master’s in journalism from Ohio State University in 1976. Mr. Bogdanich has been awarded three Pulitzer Prizes. In 2008, he shared the award in investigative reporting with Jake Hooker for “Toxic Pipeline,” articles exposing toxic ingredients in Chinese-made products. In 2005, he won in national reporting for his series, “Death on the Tracks.” He received the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for his articles in The Wall Street Journal on substandard medical laboratories. He has also won four George Polk Awards.

    Listen to Prof. Bogdanich on BlogTalkRadio.

  • Ty Lawson is a creative global media and education professional experienced in broadcast and digital news as well as filmmaking. He arrived at Columbia Journalism School in the Fall of 2023. Since then, he has helped reshape the City Newsroom class to reflect the current media landscape. Ty also offered a 360-reporting course to students. In addition to his teaching duties at Columbia Ty is member of a bi-coastal team collaboration made up of people from Columbia Journalism School and Stanford University’s School of Engineering that won a “Magic Grant” from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation. They are developing an AI assisted platform to analyze cross-lingual, country-specific perspectives on global news stories. He was a Summer 2024 Scholar in Residence at the Columbia Global Centers Beijing.

    Ty spent two weeks in Beijing researching and engaging with fellow academics and film professionals. Prior to coming to Columbia, He was the inaugural Marion M. And John S. Stokes Visiting Professor in Race and Culture in Media at Loyola University’s School of Communication and Design. At Loyola, he spent two years developing classes that prepared journalist for the ever-changing media landscape. This included Advanced Journalism, Storytelling on Emerging Platforms and Mapping Human Trafficking which he taught to students at Loyola and Universidad Austral in Argentina. Ty has worked for national and international broadcasters ABC News' "Good Morning America”, NBC’s “3rd Hour Today”, BBC Worldwide, and CCTV’S CGTN Digital division producing innovative content. He started his career in local television news working in various markets across the nation including Chicago, Boston, and Houston.

    As a filmmaker, Ty has produced more than a dozen short films that have screened at the world’s biggest film festivals including Cannes, Berlinale, and Toronto. He was selected as a Berlinale Talent in 2014. His career has taken him around the world living in New York, Beijing, Los Angeles, Hong Kong,\ Singapore, and Seoul. Ty is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts with a MFA focusing on International Media Producing.

    He has served as an adjunct professor at ESRA International Film School’s (France) graduate study abroad in New York City and a guest lecturer at Universidad Austral (Argentina), Macquarie University (Australia), The University of Hong Kong, and Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

    Ty is a member of the Special Honors Committee for the National Association of Black Journalists, the Writers Guild of America, Ghetto Film School Roster and a former Executive Board Member, the Louisiana Professional Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

  • Trevin Smith is a video journalist and documentary filmmaker, focusing on workers rights, misinformation and the food industry. His work has appeared in print, online, television, and in film festivals across the U.S. Having cooked professionally for 10 years, he utilizes his passion and creativity instilled under the many chefs he cooked under in the visual stories he tells today. 

    Trevin was educated at Castro Valley high School in the East Bay Area, Las Positas College, San Jose State University and Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he earned his MS in 2020. He currently serves on the Journalism & Media Studies advisory board at Las Positas College and has led efforts to introduce journalism into elementary school teaching in California. 

    Trevin was a 2022 FASPE Journalism Fellow and is a Producer/Editor at VERIFY. He is currently producing a documentary following food delivery app drivers around New York that reveals the dangers they regularly endure. 

  • Thor Neureiter is a veteran independent documentary producer and director whose work is focused on contemporary issues concerning U.S. foreign policy and domestic politics. His first independent feature documentary, which he directed, shot, and edited, “Disaster Capitalism (link is external)” will be released in 2017. The film was selected to the prestigious HotDocs Forum and has received support from The Bertha Foundation, The Film Collaborative, Documentary Australia Foundation, and Screen Australia.

    During his career Thor has produced films for People & Power on Al Jazeera English and worked on programming for FRONTLINE on PBS, including “Showdown with Iran,” “News War: Secrets, Sources & Spin,” “The Last Abortion Clinic,” and “The O.J. Verdict.” He has also worked extensively for HBO and began his career working for Ken Burns/Florentine Films in 1999 as an Assistant Editor on the 10-part series “Jazz.” His first documentary as a producer, “Miracle in New York: The Story of the ’69 Mets,” was awarded a 2010 New York Emmy Award. Thor holds an M.A. Politics degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. While enrolled in the M.A. program, he began advising journalism students at Columbia which eventually lead to his current position of Director, Video Journalism at the school.

  • Tom Weber is a contributing editor at TIME. He is a past executive editor of TIME, where he directed the magazine’s longform journalism, as well as a former managing editor of Newsweek. As a technology reporter at The Wall Street Journal, Weber was named the paper’s first Internet columnist in 1999. He went on to become a bureau chief and a founding editor of the Journal’s Saturday edition.

    A native of Michigan, Weber began his career covering local news and politics at the Daily Item of Clinton, Mass. He has taught journalism as a Ferris Professor at Princeton University and as director of the magazine program at New York University’s Summer Publishing Institute. Weber is a graduate of Princeton University. He serves as president of the board of trustees for The Daily Princetonian, the nonprofit independent student newspaper.

  • Thomas Xenakis is a film and video editor and post production supervisor for broadcast and digital. He currently works for the CBS Evening News. He has a long experience editing commercials, films, promos and documentaries in multiple workflows, languages and delivery formats.

  • Terry Parris Jr. is an engagement journalist with more than 15 years of experience working with newsrooms, libraries, universities, community groups and the public on ambitious storytelling projects. He’s dedicated to cultivating community-centered storytelling and fostering meaningful engagement with the subjects and communities he works in. He currently serves as Public Square Editor for Headway, an initiative by The New York Times.

    Before joining Headway, Terry was the Engagement Director at THE CITY where he launched several of its most impactful — and award winning — community-driven projects including The Open Newsroom, Civic Newsroom and MISSING THEM. Terry served as a deputy editor at ProPublica, where he was part of the team that was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting. He currently teaches at Queens College (City University of New York) and advises students at the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Reporting at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Additionally, Terry is pursuing a master's degree in Library and Information Science at the Pratt Institute, focusing on public engagement and programming.

  • Tami Luhby, '97 M.S., is a senior writer at CNN, where she covers health care policy, the safety net and income inequality.

    Before joining CNN in 2008, she covered personal finance for Newsday. Prior to that, she worked at Crain's New York Business and American Banker. She also worked as a metro reporter at the Home News Tribune and at the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey.

    In her spare time, Tami does triathlons and marathons with her husband. A Bronx native who still lives there, Tami is also a graduate of Columbia College.

  • Tamar Lewin was a reporter at The New York Times for more than three decades, mostly on the national desk. During that time, she covered many different beats, including higher education, legal affairs and assisted reproduction, writing a mix of daily news stories and multi-part series – among them, a look at the growing practice of embryo freezing and the wrenching questions it can raise, and a report from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates on American universities' sudden race to create overseas branches. Whether the topic is transracial adoption or why women outpace men in education, she is drawn to stories that illustrate how social issues play out at an individual level.

    Lewin was part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for a project on how race is lived in America: her story followed a trio of close friends – one African-American, one white, and one half Hispanic, half Jewish – in suburban New Jersey, as their tight middle-school friendship dissolved along racial lines in high school, buffeted by the social expectations surrounding them.

    Prior to joining The Times, she worked at The Bergen Record (NJ) and was the founding Washington bureau chief, and then managing editor, of the National Law Journal. She is a graduate of Barnard College and Columbia Law School.

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    Tali Woodward is the Editor in Chief at The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom that covers gun violence in America. She sets editorial strategy, guides deep investigations, and edits many of The Trace’s feature stories. Since starting at The Trace in 2018, she has coached reporters and editors on producing memorable public interest journalism, including investigations into the National Rifle Association and narrative features on the effects of shootings. Prior to joining The Trace, Woodward was the director of the Master of Arts program at Columbia Journalism School, where she taught courses on reporting, interviewing, and longform writing. Before that, Woodward was a reporter at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, where she covered education, local politics, and health care, and wrote for magazines including Newsweek, New York, and National Geographic. Woodward earned a B.A. in history from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.A. in science journalism from Columbia University, where she continues to teach.

  • Professor Nasar was the first James S. and John L. Knight Professor of Business Journalism. She co-directed the M.A. program in business journalism.

    Professor Nasar is the author of the bestselling biography, "A Beautiful Mind," which has been published in 30 languages, including Farsi, Turkish, Russian and Hindi, and inspired the Academy Award-winning movie directed by Ron Howard (2001).

    Trained as an economist, Professor Nasar was a New York Times economics correspondent (1991-1999), staff writer at Fortune (1983-1989) and columnist at U.S. News & World Report (1990). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Newsweek, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Fast Company, London Telegraph and numerous other publications. 

    She lectured on topics ranging from globalization and economics to mental illness and mathematics. Professor Nasar co-edited "The Essential John Nash" (2001) and “Best American Science Writing of 2008” (2009), acted as creative consultant for the American Experience documentary, “A Brilliant Madness” (2001), and wrote the script for the 321 Fast Draw video, “The History of Economic Progress in Four Minutes” (2011).

    She is the recipient of many honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2013), the Berlin Prize (2013), the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Science and Technology (2011), the Spears Financial History Book of the Year Award (2011), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography (1998) and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography (1998). She has held visiting fellowships at the Russell Sage Foundation (2006-2007), the MacDowell Colony (2006), Yaddo (2005), the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2002-2003, 1995-96); and Kings and Churchill Colleges, Cambridge University (2000). She has served as a judge for the National Book Award, Anthony Lucas Book Award, the Lynton History Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, Dow Jones Newswires, and SABEW and serves on the advisory board of TeenScreen.

    Professor Nasar, who grew up in Germany and Turkey, received her B.A. in literature from Antioch College (1970) and her M.A. in economics from New York University (1976). She was awarded honorary doctorates from De Paul University (2005) and Niagara University (2011).

  • Stuart Karle is a partner and general counsel of North Base Media, a boutique firm that invests in media in emerging markets and technology that supports journalism. NBM has invested in journalism-focused companies in Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and South America. He was the Chief Operating Officer of Reuters News from 2011 through 2013, and for many years was the principal lawyer at Dow Jones & Company working on news-related issues for all Dow Jones publications, print and electronic and the general counsel of The Wall Street Journal. He is also an adjunct professor teaching media law at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism since 2009.

  • Steve Eder is an investigative reporter for The New York Times. He most recently reported on policing in America, sharing in the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for an investigative series on deadly traffic stops. He also was part of the team of Times journalists honored with the the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. At The Times, he has also served as an investigative sports reporter, covered the 2016 presidential campaign, and written extensively about the presidency of Donald J. Trump, among other subjects. Before joining The Times in 2012, he reported for the Wall Street Journal, Reuters and The Toledo (Ohio) Blade.

  • Steve Coll is an editor at the Economist, the author of nine books of nonfiction, and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Between 1985 and 2005, he was a reporter, foreign correspondent and senior editor at the Washington Post. There he covered Wall Street, served as the paper’s South Asia correspondent in New Delhi, and was the Post’s first international investigative correspondent, based in London. He served as managing editor of the Post between 1998 and 2004. The following year, he joined The New Yorker, where was a staff writer until 2023, when he joined the Economist as a senior editor. 

    Coll is the author of “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001,” published in 2004, for which he received an Overseas Press Club Award and a Pulitzer Prize. His 2008 book, “The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century,” won the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction in 2009 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. His book “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power” won the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Award as the best business book of 2012. His book "Directorate S," a follow-up to "Ghost Wars," received the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. 

    His most recent book, published in February 2024, is “The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq.” 

    He has four children and is married to Eliza Griswold, the journalist and poet. He has a B.A. in English and history from Occidental College.

     

  • Steve Adler has led national and global newsrooms for more than two decades, most recently as editor-in-chief of Reuters.

    A global advocate for free speech and journalism ethics, Adler is board chair of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and a board member and immediate past chair at the Columbia Journalism Review.

    Adler started his career as a local-government reporter at the Tampa Times and the Tallahassee Democrat. Later, he joined The American Lawyer and, in 1988, The Wall Street Journal. During his 16 years at the Journal, he worked as a reporter and editor, managing teams that won three Pulitzer Prizes. As deputy managing editor, he co-taught the ethics course required of all news employees. In 2005, he became editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek; during his five-year tenure, the magazine won over 100 major journalism awards.

    In 2011, Adler was named editor-in-chief of Reuters and, over a decade, transformed it into a modern newsroom that excelled in investigative reporting, data journalism, and graphics. Under his leadership, Reuters won eight Pulitzer Prizes. In 2023, Adler won the Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award.

    Adler is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He is the author of The Jury: Trial and Error in the American Courtroom. Along with his wife, the novelist Lisa Grunwald, he co-edited three popular historical anthologies: Letters of the CenturyWomen's Letters and The Marriage Book.

  • Stephania Taladrid is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, where she covers Latino communities across the United States. She has written on topics ranging from the 2020 Presidential election to the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. For her reporting on the fall of Roe v. Wade, Taladrid was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist, won a Whiting Award in nonfiction, and was recognized as a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Public Interest.

    In 2022, Taladrid reported and produced “American Scar,” a short documentary on the environmental implications of the border wall, which received a special mention from the jury at the film festival DOC NYC. She has also reported from Latin America and Spain, writing about the legacy of the Franco dictatorshipVenezuela’s humanitarian crisis, and foreign affairs.

    Taladrid grew up in Mexico, the United States, Spain, and France, and earned a master’s degree in Latin American studies from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Before joining the magazine, she was a political speechwriter.

  • Sheila Coronel began reporting in the Philippines during the twilight of the Marcos dictatorship, when she wrote for the underground opposition press and later for mainstream magazines and newspapers. As Marcos lost power and press restrictions eased, she reported on human rights abuses, the growing democratic movement and the election of Corazon Aquino as president. 

    In 1989, Coronel and her colleagues founded the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. Under Coronel's leadership, the Center became the leading investigative reporting institution in the Philippines and Asia. In 2001, the Center’s reporting led to the fall of President Joseph Estrada. In 2003, Coronel won Asia’s premier prize, the Ramon Magsaysay Award. 

    Coronel has written and edited more than a dozen books on the Philippines, freedom of information and investigative journalism. She has trained journalists around the world and written investigative reporting textbooks for journalists in Southeast Asia and the Balkan region. She speaks frequently at international investigative reporting conferences and writes about global investigative journalism. 

    Coronel joined the faculty of the Journalism School in 2006, when she was named director of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism. In 2011, she received one of Columbia University’s highest honors, the Presidential Teaching Award. 

    Coronel believes we are in a pivotal moment for investigative reporting, one that is ripe with opportunity but also fraught with challenges and threats. Coronel’s work outside of the Journalism School reflects her desire to build strong institutions that support free and independent reporting in a turbulent media landscape. She is chair of the Media Development Investment Fund board. She also sits on the boards of the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Columbia Journalism Review, ProPublica and the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. She is also a member and former board chair of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

    Her recent work is on the populist Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and police abuses in the war on drugs.

  • Sharon L. Lynch is an independent journalist most recently focused on humanitarian crises around the world. Previously, she served as deputy managing editor for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. For more than a decade, Professor Lynch worked as a business reporter and editor for Bloomberg News, where her work earned multiple awards during the 2007-2009 global financial crisis. She began her career as a statehouse reporter, editor, and national writer for The Associated Press and holds a master's degree in public policy analysis from Carnegie Mellon University.

  • Seyma Bayram, M.S. ‘19, is a Kurdish-American reporter with a background in print, radio and visual journalism. She was a 2023-2024 Spencer Education Fellow at Columbia Journalism School and the 2022-2023 Reflect America Fellow at National Public Radio in Washington, D.C., where she reported for the climate and visuals desks and produced for All Things Considered. Her news photography has appeared in The Associated Press, CNN, The Washington Post and other outlets.

    As a print reporter, Seyma covered race, violence against LGBTQ+ communities, gun legislation, the 2020 general election, abortion access and legacies of redlining and racism in urban planning for the Akron Beacon Journal in Akron, Ohio. She began her journalism career reporting on local government and criminal justice at an alt-weekly in Jackson, Mississippi. Her local reporting won awards from The Associated Press, the Society of Professional Journalists and The Press Club of Cleveland, among others.

    Before entering journalism, Seyma worked as a high school writing teacher, book editor and curator. She is from the Kurdish region of Turkey, and was raised in The Netherlands and upstate New York.

  • Sewell Chan joined the Columbia Journalism Review as executive editor in September 2024. A longtime journalist, he is passionate about journalism ethics, new business models for news, and the urgent need to support working journalists who face unprecedented challenges.

    Previously, Chan was editor in chief of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit newsroom based in Austin, from 2021 to 2024. During his tenure the Tribune won the National Magazine Award and the Collier Prize for State Government Accountability and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, all for the first time. From 2018 to 2021, Chan was a deputy managing editor and then the editorial page editor at the Los Angeles Times, where he oversaw coverage that was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.

    Chan worked at The New York Times from 2004 to 2018, as a metro reporter, Washington correspondent, deputy Op-Ed editor and international news editor. He began his career as a reporter at The Washington Post in 2000. He has also written for The Wall Street Journal and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

    A native New Yorker, Chan grew up in an immigrant family and was the first in his family to finish college. He graduated from Harvard with a degree in social studies and received a master’s degree in politics from Oxford, where he studied on a British Marshall scholarship.

    Chan is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the boards of the Henry Luce Foundation, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Freedom House, and the Pulitzer Prizes.

    Watch Chan moderate a post-election panel hosted by Columbia Journalism School, Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs and the Columbia University Office of the President: https://youtu.be/MLbGUpiOGPk

  • Sebastian is a freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. His work, which focuses on science and the natural environment,  can be found in Scientific American, Grist, Undark, Gothamist, Al Jazeera, Baltimore Brew and BBC. Sebastian teaches video storytelling at Columbia Journalism School and is a graduate of the program. He also teaches audio storytelling at Brooklyn College where he completed his undergraduate studies.

  • Gregory, the senior sports correspondent at TIME, has co-taught Columbia Journalism School’s Sports Reporting course—along with Professor Kelly Whiteside—since 2019. Sports Reporting offers students practical lessons on the ins-and-outs of covering games and personalities, while going in-depth on the critical issues dominating the athletics, on and off the field. Recent graduates of the class are now covering sports at outlets such as ESPN, the Wall Street Journal, Sporito, Front Office Sports, and the San Antonio Express-News.

    Since joining TIME as a recent J-School graduate in 2002, Gregory has authored more than 30 sports cover stories for TIME, including profiles of influential athletes like Serena Williams, LeBron James, and Megan Rapinoe, and pieces about pressing issues in sports like the economic model of college sports, the professionalization of youth sports, and football safety. Gregory has covered eight Olympic Games for TIME, as well as multiple Super Bowls, Final Fours, and other major events. Gregory’s writing has been cited in the annual Best American Sports Writing anthology nine times. 

    Gregory is a cross-platform contributor to TIME: digital video pieces with Kobe Bryant, Novak Djokovic and other athletic luminaries are among the most-viewed in TIME’s history.

    A native and current resident of the Bronx, Gregory holds a B.A. in public policy from Princeton University, where he also played varsity basketball. He also holds an M.S. from the J-School.

  • Sean Campbell is an investigative journalist living in New York City. His stories focus on public health and gun violence, and have prompted action from members of Congress, change in the CDC, and contributed to changing Twitter's policy. 

    Campbell's investigations have covered topics ranging from New York tax credits for businesses, to children being shot in Flint, Michigan, to nursing home deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic. His pieces on disproportionate gunshot death rates in New York City sparked conversations about hospital trauma care, promises for action from local politicians, and discussion within the data journalism community on combining gun violence and health reporting. His interrogation of the "Craigslist" of gun sales formed the basis for a lawsuit against Armlist.com, and his pandemic reporting has spurred legislation by state lawmakers. 

    He's won the Les Payne Award for Coverage on Communities of Color from the Society of Professional Journalists' Deadline Club and a Sidney Award from the Hillman Foundation, among other recognitions. His feature work has been published by ProPublica, The Verge, BuzzFeed News and FiveThirtyEight, among other outlets. His short stories have appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review and Hayden's Ferry Review.

    He holds BS in aerospace engineering from the University of Florida, an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College, and a master of science degree from Columbia Journalism School with a specialization in data journalism.

  • Sarah Carr has covered education for more than two decades for publications including The Washington Post, The Atlantic, the Hechinger Report and Slate. She has served as the Ottaway Visiting Professor of Journalism at SUNY New Paltz, teaching a course on covering inequality through the lens of youth; and for five years she led Columbia Journalism School’s Teacher Project fellowship, spearheading collaborations with more than 30 editorial partners. Her reporting has won more than a dozen local and national awards. Past fellowship grants include the Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship, the O’Brien Fellowship for Public Service Journalism, and the Russell Sage Visiting Journalist fellowship.

    Carr has also been editor of an investigative education reporting team at the Boston Globe, The Great Divide, and a staff writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, the New Orleans Times Picayune, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She is the author of “Hope Against Hope” (Bloomsbury, 2013), about New Orleans schools after Hurricane Katrina, which was selected as a campus-wide read at Tulane University and Macalester College. She is on the board of directors of the national Education Writers Association.

  • Sarah Bellingham is a documentarian and freelance video journalist. She is currently in post-production on the feature documentary "People 4 Trump," a three-year collaboration with co-director Max Toomey. Sarah’s past documentary work includes HLN’s Inside with Chris Cuomo, HHMI’s Great Transitions: The Origin of Birds and HHMI’s The Origin of Species: The Making of a Theory. Her freelance work has appeared on The Washington Post, Eurasianet, The Daily Beast and Food Network. She appeared on BBC News to report on the 2018 U.S. midterms.

    Sarah graduated Middlebury College with high honors in International Studies specializing in Eastern Europe and Russia. After working in independent documentary in Boston, she attended Columbia Journalism School where received the Columbia Alumni Fund, Jonathan Maslow Endowed Scholarship Fund, UPS, Keene and Taishoff Scholarships. Following graduation, Sarah was awarded a Pulitzer Student Fellowship.

    Sarah has working proficiency in both Russian and French. She has worked in the field wearing a bullet-proof vest, a ballgown and holy water—though not all at the same time.

  • Sara Ganim is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and former CNN investigative correspondent who regularly publishes in print and broadcast. A multi-platform reporter, Ganim has written for newspapers, cable television, audio, and documentaries and has won several of the industry’s top awards.

    At age 24, she won a Pulitzer Prize for the Harrisburg Patriot-News for breaking and covering the investigation into former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse of young boys.

    Ganim then spent seven years at CNN, covering multiple beats, including federal government agencies, the rise of the anti-fascist movement in the U.S., the NCAA, and contaminated American drinking water.

    In 2015, she won a Sigma Delta Chi award from the Society of Professional Journalists for her investigative report exposing the low reading levels of some college athletes.

    Since leaving CNN, Ganim has mostly worked in audio, developing, reporting and hosting several award-winning podcasts. Her most recent project was "Believable: The Coco Berthmann Story," produced by Dear Media. "Believable" was named one of The Atlantic’s top 25 podcasts of 2023.

    In 2021, she launched a podcast with Advance Local and Meadowlark Media called "The Mayor of Maple Avenue," about the intersection of trauma and addiction and societal failures in the wake of the #meToo movement. The podcast won the Keystone Award for best podcast of 2024.
    Ganim also created the podcast "Why Don’t We Know," which won the EWA’s public service award in 2020.

    In 2020, she also made her first independent film, No Defense, which garnered film festival recognition. She has consulted or reported for several other films, including the Emmy-nominated films, Deadly Haze and Paterno.

    Ganim is a prior recipient of Hearst, Loyola Law School and Columbia Spencer Education fellowships. Other recognitions include the the 2020 Education Writers Association public service award, 2012 National Sexual Violence Resource Center Visionary Voice Award, 2012 APME President’s Award, 2011 George Polk award, the 2011 Scripps-Howard award, 2012 American Society of News Editors for distinguished writing, 2011 Sidney Hillman’s Sidney Award, a 2010 Golden Quill and the 2010 Bar Association journalism award, 2008 Gannet Media Foundation multimedia award.

    She is currently the journalist-in-residence at the University of Florida’s Brechner Center for Freedom of Information. She also serves as a member of the board of trustees at Lebanese American University.

    She is a 2008 graduate of Penn State University.

  • Samuel G. Freedman is an award-winning author, columnist, and professor. A former columnist for The New York Times and a professor at Columbia University, he is the author of the nine acclaimed books, and is currently at work on his tenth, which will be about Hubert Humphrey, Civil Rights, and the 1948 Democratic convention.

    Freedman’s previous books are Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students and Their High School (1990); Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church (1993); The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond (1996); Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (2000); Who She Was: My Search for My Mother’s Life (2005); and Letters To A Young Journalist (2006); and Breaking The Line: The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Game and Changed the Course of Civil Rights (2013).

    With his colleague Kerry Donahue, Freedman co-produced a radio documentary and authored a companion book, both entitled Dying Words: The AIDS Reporting of Jeff Schmalz and How it Transformed The New York Times. The documentary and book were released in conjunction with World AIDS Day on December 1, 2015, and since then the documentary has been broadcast on more than 500 NPR member stations. Most recently, Freedman wrote Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: The Journey From Stage to Screen, the companion book to the film adaptation of August Wilson’s classic play.

    Small Victories was a finalist for the 1990 National Book Award and The Inheritance was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize. Upon This Rock won the 1993 Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. Four of Freedman’s books have been listed among The New York Times’ Notable Books of the Year.
     
    Jew vs. Jew won the National Jewish Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2001 and made the Publishers Weekly Religion Best-Sellers list. As a result of the book, Freedman was named one of the “Forward Fifty” most important American Jews in the year 2000 by the weekly Jewish newspaper The Forward.

    Freedman was a staff reporter for The New York Times from 1981 through 1987. From 2004 through 2008, he wrote the paper’s “On Education” column, winning first prize in the Education Writers Association’s annual competition in 2005. From 2006 through 2016, Freedman wrote the “On Religion” column, receiving the Goldziher Prize for Journalists in 2017 for a series of columns about Muslim-Americans that had been published over the preceding six years.

    Freedman has contributed to numerous other publications and websites, including The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Daily Beast, New York, Rolling Stone, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Buzzfeed, Salon, Slate, Chicago Sun-Times, Tablet, The Forward, Ha’aretz, The Undefeated, The Root, and BeliefNet.

    Freedman was named the nation's outstanding journalism educator in 1997 by the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2012, he received Columbia University’s coveted Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. Freedman’s class in book-writing has developed more than 100 authors, editors, and agents, and it has been featured in Publishers Weekly and the Christian Science Monitor. He is a board member of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Awards and member of the Journalism Advisory Council of Religion News Service. 

    Freedman holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

  • Samir S. Patel is an editor, science writer and photographer. He is Editor-in-Chief of Atlas Obscura, and before that was Deputy Editor at Archaeology Magazine. His work has appeared in Nature, The New York Times, National Public Radio, Discover, and other publications. He has reported from all over the world — the South Pacific, India, Tanzania, Brazil, Australia, and more — and has covered a wide range of topics, from archaeology and climate, to art conservation and social justice.

    Samir studied at Columbia in the dual-degree Earth and Environmental Science Journalism program and has an undergraduate degree from Duke University and a graduate degree from New York University. He lives with his family in Brooklyn.

  • 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.

  • Rosalind Adams is an investigative reporter for THE CITY. She was previously an investigative reporter at BuzzFeed News, and her work has also appeared in Barron’s, ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity and the Miami Herald.

  • Robert Kolker is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a #1 New York Times bestselling author of narrative nonfiction whose work has been published in 19 countries and 12 languages. His most recent book, "Hidden Valley Road” (2020), was selected for Oprah's Book Club and was a top ten book of the year for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post; People magazine's No. 1 book of the year; and featured in President Barack Obama’s list of favorite books of the year. His first book book, "Lost Girls” (2013), called one the greatest works of nonfiction in the last 25 years by Slate, was adapted into a feature film for Netflix and put pressure on police to make an arrest in a decade-old criminal case. 

    Before joining the Times, Kolker published articles for New York magazine, the Atlantic, Wired, Bloomberg Businessweek, and many other outlets. He is a National Magazine Award finalist and a recipient of the 2011 Harry Frank Guggenheim Award for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In 2021, his article, “Who Is The Bad Art Friend?" became a viral hit and the New York Times Magazine's most read story of the year. A feature story for New York magazine about a public-school embezzling scandal was the basis for another feature film, "Bad Education," starring Hugh Jackman.  

  • Robert Smith is a host for NPR's Planet Money where he tells stories about how the global economy is affecting our lives.

    Prior to Planet Money, Smith was a national and New York City correspondent for NPR, covering a variety of breaking news stories, from Hurricane Katrina to the "Miracle on the Hudson" landing of US Airways Flight 1549.

    Smith’s career in radio started at KPCW in his hometown of Park City, Utah. He continued his passion for radio at the campus radio station at Reed College in Portland, Ore., before moving on to work at public radio stations in Portland, Salt Lake City and Seattle.

  • Robe Imbriano is the Emmy Award-winning showrunner of the Hulu series, Killing County, which he Executive Produced with Colin Kaepernick.  He co-created the Netflix documentary series Amend, starring Will Smith and featuring Mahershala Ali, Samuel L. Jackson, Sherrilyn Ifill, Bryan Stevenson and a distinguished group of scholars, participants and actors to tell the story of the 14th Amendment and America’s struggle with equality. 

    He was a showrunner of the launch of Soul of a Nation, the very first major broadcast network series about Black life in America, nominated for 11 Emmy Awards in its very first season.  Imbriano has written and produced for everyone from Diane Sawyer and Peter Jennings to Bill Moyers and Oprah Winfrey, winning numerous honors along the way.  He created a series of first-person pieces featuring the voices of America’s economically and socially marginalized for ABC News in prime time.  He’s profiled Jay-Z and Hank Aaron, explored the lives of scientists with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and compared Jazz to Democracy with Wynton Marsalis and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

  • Rita Omokha is an award-winning Nigerian American writer and journalist in New York City. Her writing on race and culture has appeared in Cosmopolitan, Elle, The Daily Beast, Glamour, Teen Vogue, USA TODAY, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post and WIRED. Her reporting has also been featured on major networks such as CNN. Omokha’s enterprise projects include Elle’s "America Redefined" and Vanity Fair’s "They Were Sons," which examine race in America and police violence against communities of color.

    Omokha received an M.S. from Columbia Journalism School, where she graduated at the top of the 2020 class, receiving some of the institution's highest awards, including the Pulitzer Prize Traveling Fellowship, the Lynton Foundation Award in Book Writing and the Bill Campbell Award. During her time at the Journalism School, she served as co-president of the African Student Association, which spotlighted the intersection of journalism, press freedom and the African diaspora. Omokha previously worked in digital media for CNN, NBC and Viacom and served in AmeriCorps in 2013.

    Omokha will be publishing "Resist: How a Century of Young Black Activists Shaped America," a Publishers Weekly top 10 highly anticipated fall book of history, in November 2024. 

  • Richard R. John is a historian who specializes in the history of business, technology, communications, and American political development. He teaches and advises graduate students in Columbia’s Ph.D. program in communications, and is member of the core faculty of the Columbia history department, where he teaches courses on the history of capitalism and the history of communications. His publications include many essays, eight edited books, and two monographs: "Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse" (1995) and "Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications" (2010).

    John has been a fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago and the Smithsonian Institution's Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D. C., and has served as a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Among the institutions that have sponsored his research are the College of William and Mary, the American Antiquarian Society, and the National Endowment of the Humanities, which awarded him a faculty fellowship in 2008. Spreading the News received several national awards, including the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians and the Herman E. Krooss Prize from the Business History Conference. Network Nation won the first Ralph Gomory Book Prize from the Business History Conference and was the 2010 Best Book in Journalism and Mass Communication History, an award bestowed by the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. In 2019, he was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship for his research on the history of American anti-monopoly thought. Partial funding for Professor Richard R. John's research project on American anti-monopoly thought is provided by the Economic Security Project. John is a former president of the Business History Conference, an international professional society dedicated to the study of institutional history.

    Between 1977 and 1989, John earned a B.A. in social studies (magna cum laude), a M.A. in history and a Ph.D. in the history of American civilization, all from Harvard University.


    Download CV Visit Columbia Academia profile

  • Randi Hutter Epstein, M.D. is a medical author and freelance journalist. Her work explores the intersections of science and society. Randi is the author of Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything(W.W.Norton, 2018) which has been translated into a dozen languages and was named a “best book of 2018,” by Science News and a Forbes “favorite brain book of 2018.”  Her first book, Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank was published by Norton in 2010. 

    Randi began her journalism career more than thirty years ago as a medical writer for the London bureau of the Associated Press. She covered breaking medical news and also wrote medical features. She also served as London bureau chief for Physician’s Weekly. Since then, she has written for the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington PostSlate, the Daily Telegraph, and several national magazines.  

    Randi is also the Writer in Residence at Yale School of Medicine, and a lecturer in the English Department at Yale College. She received an M.D. from Yale University, an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, an M.P.H. from the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1996, she was a Reuter Foundation Fellow for Medical Journalists at the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University. 

  • Rachel Quester is a senior producer for "The Daily," the audio news show from The New York Times. She joined the Times in the spring of 2017 as "The Daily" was just getting underway, helping to develop the show’s unique sound and approach to the biggest stories of the day. Her role on the team includes driving the show's political coverage for news and narrative storytelling, and producing breaking news and long-form episodes every week. Prior to joining the Times, she produced podcasts at NPR and the E.W. Scripps Washington Bureau.

  • 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.

  • Peter Leonard is an audio engineer, composer, and sound designer for narrative podcasts, as well as a budding educator in audio. Currently, he works at Gimlet (a Spotify Originals studio), where his sound designing, mixing and composition credits include "StartUp," "Science Vs," "How To Save A Planet," "The Cut On Tuesdays" and "Without Fail." Prior to Gimlet, Peter was at Vox Media, where he developed podcasting technical infrastructure at their DC headquarters and went on to work on shows such as "The Weeds," "Ezra Klein Show" and "Worldly;" he was also at SiriusXM as an on-air producer for talk programming. Peter studied Audio Engineering and Electrical Engineering at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor before getting his Masters in Audio Technology at American University. Now, Peter is passionate about teaching technical resources in podcasting. 

  • Payton Guion is an investigative reporter at Newsday. He previously reported for The Charlotte Observer, The Star-Ledger and The Asbury Park Press. He graduated from Columbia Journalism School in 2016 and has been teaching at the school since 2021. Payton lives in Brooklyn with his longtime girlfriend and their two dogs.

  • Paula Span spent 16 years as a New York correspondent for the Washington Post Style section and a staff writer for the Washington Post Magazine. She now writes "The New Old Age (link is external)," a column about aging and caregiving, for the New York Times. Her book “When the Time Comes (link is external)," following several families caring for aging parents, was published by Hachette.  More recently, she adapted her Generation Grandparent columns for the New York Times into an audio title, released by Audible, called “The Bubbe Diaries (link is external).” To her great surprise, she is the narrator.

    An inveterate freelancer, she has written for dozens of newspapers and magazines including New York, Esquire, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Smithsonian, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer and USA Today. She publishes long Q&As for Amazon’s Kindle Single Interview project. She speaks at conferences and gatherings around the country about aging and grandparenting. 

    She has taught journalism at Montclair State University and was a McGraw Professor in Writing at Princeton; she has led workshops for the Alaska Press Club, the South Asian Journalists Association and the Washington Post In-House University. She graduated from the Boston University School of Public Communication, then dropped out of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

    She blames her entire career on having read back-to-back kid lit biographies of Joseph Pulitzer and Nellie Bly in the fourth grade.

  • Patricia Sulbarán Lovera is a bilingual reporter and multimedia producer based in New York City. She works as an audio producer at Futuro Media and PRX's Latino USA. She studied journalism in Caracas and has worked as a reporter in her native Venezuela, Colombia and the United States. Most recently, she has produced long-form audio journalism about the Cuban protests of July 2021, the 10th Anniversary of DACA and the labor rights movement against rideshare apps in California. In her previous role as a Los Angeles-based Correspondent with BBC News Mundo, she extensively covered U.S. immigration policy and U.S. Latinx communities for online, TV and radio outlets across the BBC.

  • An Emmy award-winning filmmaker, journalist, and media executive, Pamela Hogan’s feature documentary The Day Iceland Stood Still about the 1975 Icelandic feminist uprising that sparked a revolution is called “A Worldwide Cri de Coeur” by the Globe and Mail, Canada’s newspaper of record. After premiering at Toronto’s Hot Docs film festival, the film is rolling out at numerous festivals around the world. Her independent film Looks like Laury Sounds like Laury - about the mother of two young children confronting a neurological breakdown – was hailed as one of “The Best TV Shows of 2015” by The New York Times and honored with a Gabriel Award. She was Co-Creator and Executive Producer of the PBS series Women, War & Peace and Director of Episode 1, I Came to Testify, about the Bosnian women who changed international law when they testified about wartime rape for the first time in history. Seen by 12 million viewers, the films won 2 Overseas Press Club awards, a Television Academy Honor, and a Gracie Award; and I Came to Testify was awarded the ABA’s Silver Gavel for excellence in fostering the American public’s understanding of law.

    Previously, Pamela was Executive Producer of PBS’s international series Wide Angle. Working closely with global filmmakers on 70 programs filmed in 50 countries, she also originated and developed the Emmy-winning Ladies First about women’s leadership in post-genocide Rwanda, and launched the Time for School series following 7 children in 7 countries from kindergarten through high school as they fight the odds to get a basic education (Gabriel Award, Overseas Press Club citation, IDA nominee). Her speaking engagements include the White House, USIP, Capitol Hill, the Asia Society, the U.N., CFR, and Harvard and UC Berkeley Law Schools. A graduate of Harvard College, she holds a Master’s in Journalism from Columbia.

  • Pallavi Gogoi is NPR’s Chief Business Editor. Each day, she helps set the agenda for how NPR covers the biggest business, economics, tech and media stories. Her mission is to bring a deeper understanding of these topics and showcase the power they have to shape the lives of people and change the course of history. Under her leadership, her team members have done distinctive work that have won a bevy of awards, including the Edward Murrow, Gracies, Scripps Howard, National Headliner and SABEW.

    She has served as a journalism professor at Princeton University and Columbia University. She has over 25 years of experience working as a newsroom leader, editor and reporter at CNN, Business Week, The Associated Press, USA Today and Dow Jones. In addition to English, she is fluent in Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, proficient in Urdu.

  • Olivia Carville is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg News. She is an award-winning journalist who has written multiple cover stories for Businessweek magazine. A native of New Zealand, Olivia moved to New York City in 2017. Prior to joining Bloomberg, she worked as an investigative reporter for The New Zealand Herald and The Toronto Star. Olivia's work has influenced legislation and exposed corporate wrongdoing in New Zealand, Canada and America. In 2022, she was awarded Global Business Journalist of the Year by the Women's Economic Roundtable. She has a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and serves on the board of the New York Financial Writers Association.

  • Nushin Rashidian is the co-founder of the news organization Cannabis Wire and the co-author of the book A New Leaf: The End of Cannabis Prohibition (The New Press, 2014). She served as the research lead on the “Platforms and Publishers” project at Columbia Journalism School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Democracy Journal, The Guardian, and Nieman Reports.

  • Nina Berman is a documentary photographer and filmmaker. Her work explores American politics, militarism, environmental issues and post violence trauma. She is the author of Purple Hearts – Back from Iraq, (Trolley, 2004) portraits and interviews with wounded American veterans, Homeland, (Trolley, 2008) an examination of the militarization of American life post September 11, and an autobiography of Miss Wish (Kehrer, 2017) a story told with a survivor of sexual violence which was shortlisted for both the Aperture and Arles book prizes. Additional fellowships, awards and grants include: the New York Foundation for the Arts, the World Press Photo Foundation, Pictures of the Year International, the Open Society Foundation, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, the MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship and the Aftermath Project.

    She started her photographic career in 1988 as an independent photographer working on assignment for the world’s major magazines including Time, Newsweek, Life, the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, German Geo, and the Sunday Times Magazine. She covered a range of issues, from women under siege during war in Bosnia and Afghanistan, to domestic issues of criminal justice, reproductive rights, and political process.

    Her photographs and videos have been exhibited at more than 100 international venues including the Whitney Museum Biennial, and are represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of the City of New York, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the Library of Congress and the Bibliothèque nationale de France among others.

    She received a B.A. from the University of Chicago and a M.S. from the Columbia Journalism School.

  • Nina Alvarez is a journalist, documentarian and video photographer. For over twenty-five years, she has reported breaking news and feature stories from around the world, on broadcast and web segments, radio reports and long-form documentaries.

    Alvarez began her journalism career at ABC News, where she was a production associate on the acclaimed documentary series, Turning Point. She went on to work in the Miami Bureau covering news in the southeast US and Latin America and established the Mexico City Bureau in 1997, reporting and producing breaking news, feature and investigative stories in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her work with the network's top on-air talent was broadcast on World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, Good Morning America, Nightline and 20/20 and was recognized with three national Emmy Awards.

    Since 2001, she has reported and produced news and longform stories for Univision, NBC, CNN, NPR, MTV News and Al Jazeera from the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia and Latin America.  From 2015 to 2017, she was also Senior Producer at the Fusion/Netflix investigative series, The Naked Truth, which was recognized with the Alfred I. duPont Columbia Journalism Award, an Emmy nomination and the Al Neuharth Award for Innovation in Investigative Journalism. Alvarez is currently a Senior Editor of Investigative Projects at Futuro Media Group.

    An important theme in Alvarez's work has been the experience of migration, historically and today. She has produced numerous video reports on refugees, undocumented laborers. victims of violence or exploitation and children. In 2001, she crossed the desert border herself on assignment with ABC News Nightline. She was a producer on the Oscar-nominated film, Which Way Home (2009). She produced an episode for the landmark PBS series, Latino Americans (2012), for which she received a Peabody Award and the Imagen Award. Her short film, Fields of Promise (2016), was broadcasted on America ReFramed (PBS World Channel) and awarded the Alfred I. duPont Columbia Journalism Award. She is currently documenting the stories of Salvadoran refugees in the US, some of whom fled the civil war over thirty years ago and are now fighting deportation. The project has received support from the Independent Television Service and Latino Public Broadcasting. 

    The rights of women and girls is also an important theme in Alvarez's work. At ABC, she produced several stories about domestic violence in immigrant, low income and wealthy communities. In 2005, she documented the stories of women in northern Nigeria with injuries related to giving birth for the International Reporting Project Fellowship. In 2006, Alvarez produced, directed and photographed the Showtime documentary, Very Young Girls, which follows the stories of several New York City girls who were sexually exploited and trafficked domestically.

    Alvarez is a native New Yorker, daughter of Salvadorans and mother of a Salvadoran-Irish-French-American daughter.

  • Nicholas Lemann was born, raised and educated in New Orleans. He began his journalism career as a 17-year-old writer for an alternative weekly newspaper there, the Vieux Carre Courier. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1976, where he concentrated in American history and literature and was president of the Harvard Crimson. After graduation, he worked at the Washington Monthly, as an associate editor and then managing editor; at Texas Monthly, as an associate editor and then executive editor; at The Washington Post, as a member of the national staff; at The Atlantic Monthly, as national correspondent; and at The New Yorker, as a staff writer and then Washington correspondent.

    In September 2003, he became dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, at the end of a process of re-examination of the school's mission conducted by a national task force convened by the university's president, Lee C. Bollinger. During Lemann's time as dean, the Journalism School launched and completed its first capital fundraising campaign, added 20 members to its full-time faculty, built a student center, started its first new professional degree programs since the 1930s, and launched significant new initiatives in investigative reporting, digital journalism, executive leadership for news organizations, and other areas. He stepped down as dean in 2013, following two five-year terms. Now Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism and Dean Emeritus, he also directs Columbia Global Reports, a book publishing venture. From 2017 to 2021, he was the founding director of Columbia World Projects, a new institution that implements academic research outside the university.

    Lemann continues to contribute to The New Yorker as a staff writer. His books include Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream (2019); Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (2006); The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (1999), which helped lead to a major reform of the SAT; The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (1991), which won several book prizes. He has written widely for such publications as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and Slate; worked in documentary television with Blackside, Inc., "FRONTLINE," the Discovery Channel, and the BBC; and lectured at many universities.

    Lemann currently serves on the boards of the Authors Guild, the Knight First Amendment Institute, the Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company and the Russell Sage Foundation. He is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities and was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010 and a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 2019.

  • Naomi teaches audio journalism courses and drops in to other classes to help with voice coaching.  She is passionate about the power of audio and loves seeing students master audio journalism.  

    During her public media career, she has been a factchecker, reporter, managing editor, broadcast and podcast ("Grapple") host, news director, and program director.

    She is an editor at WAMU/DCist, Washington, D.C.'s public radio station and local news site.  She also helps the team at WKMS in Murray, KY with their podcast, "Middle of Everywhere." In the past, she has worked at WHYY (Philadelphia), WSHU (Fairfield, CT) and Consumer Reports magazine. Before becoming a journalist, was an environmental scientist, and a ranger for the National Park Service. Still has the hat.

  • Nabiha Syed is the chief executive officer of The Markup, an award-winning journalism non-profit that challenges technology to serve the public good. Under her leadership, The Markup’s unique approach has been referenced by Congress 21 times, inspired dozens of class action lawsuits, won a national Murrow Award and a Loeb Award, and been recognized as "Most Innovative" by FastCompany in 2022.

    Before launching The Markup in 2020, Nabiha spent a decade as an acclaimed media lawyer focused on the intersection of frontier technology and newsgathering, including advising on issues around the Snowden revelations and the Steele Dossier, access litigation around police disciplinary records and privatized services, as well as privacy and free speech issues globally. Described by Forbes as “one of the best emerging free speech lawyers”, she has briefed two presidents on free speech in the digital age, delivered the Salant Lecture at Harvard, headlined SXSW to discuss data privacy after Roe v. Wade, and was awarded the NAACP/Archewell Digital Civil Rights award in 2023 for her work.

    A California native and daughter of Pakistani immigrants, Nabiha holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, where she co-founded one of the nation’s first media law clinics, a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University, and a law degree from Balliol College, Oxford, which she attended as a Marshall Scholar. She serves on the boards of the New York Civil Liberties Union, The New Press, and the Scott Trust, among others. At Columbia Journalism School, Nabiha has been adjunct faculty teaching media law to journalism students

    Nabiha lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two young sons. She is a lifelong Girl Scout, and probably has Thin Mints in her handbag right this minute.

  •  

    Ming Fan is an award-winning senior investigative TV producer, former editor-in-chief of Insight, an influential interview program at China Central TV, and an independent documentary filmmaker. She excels in combining sensitive storytelling, in-depth interviews, and political analysis to tackle challenging and controversial issues in China. Her reporting has covered high-level corruption, LGBTQ issues, SARS, domestic violence, judicial injustice, environmental pollution, medical disputes, migrant workers' wage claims, college entrance exam fraud, youth depression and suicide, and counter-terrorism. She has won multiple Chinese Documentary Academy Awards.

    One of her directorial works, Under the Dome, an independent documentary focused on China's air pollution, co-produced with renowned Chinese anchorwoman Chai Jing, garnered 300 million views within just one week of its release. It deeply shaped environmental awareness and significantly influenced Chinese environmental and carbon emission policies, sparking worldwide discussion on China's environmental issues.

    Her latest documentary, The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru, which she co-directed and co-produced, premiered at the 26th Shanghai International Film Festival's Gala Screenings and was released in Chinese theaters in September 2024. It has been selected by China for submission in the Best International Feature Film category at the 97th Academy Awards.

    She was a Mason Fellow and earned her MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School. Currently, she is a visiting scholar and adjunct assistant professor at Columbia Journalism School and serves as a judge for the 45th Annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards in June 2024.

  • Michael Shapiro worked at newspapers in New Jersey and Chicago for five years before becoming a magazine writer. His work has appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine and Sports Illustrated. He is the author of five non-fiction books, Japan: In the Land of the Broken Hearted, The Shadow in the Sun, Who Will Teach for America, Solomon’s Sword and The Last Good Season.

    Shapiro received his M.A. at the University of Missouri.

  • Michael Schudson grew up in Milwaukee, Wisc. He received a B.A. from Swarthmore College and M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard. He taught at the University of Chicago from 1976 to 1980 and at the University of California, San Diego from 1980 to 2009. From 2005 on, he split his teaching between UCSD and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, becoming a full-time member of the Columbia faculty in 2009.

    He is the author of eleven books and co-editor of four others concerning the history and sociology of the American news media, advertising, popular culture, Watergate and cultural memory. He is the recipient of a number of honors; he has been a Guggenheim fellow, a resident fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto, and a MacArthur Foundation "genius" fellow. His most recent books include The Rise of the Right to Know (Harvard, 2015), Why Journalism Still Matters (Polity, 2018), and Journalism: Why It Matters (Polity, 2020). He has been awarded honorary degrees by the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) and Hong Kong Baptist University.

    Schudson's articles have appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, Wilson Quarterly, and The American Prospect, and he has published op-eds in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, the Financial Times, and The San Diego Union.

  • Mike Hoyt is an editor, writer, and journalism teacher with deep experience, and co-director of the J-school’s Writing Center. 

    He wrote and edited articles about journalism and its challenges for more than 26 years at the Columbia Journalism Review, starting in 1986. For ten of those years—2001 through 2011—he was the editor, responsible for all content and leading the magazine through two redesigns, the creation of its website, and CJR’s 40th and 50th anniversaries. He is co-editor of a CJR book, “Reporting Iraq: An Oral History of the War by the Journalists Who Covered It,” published in 2007 by Melville House.

    Before CJR, Mike was a reporter at two newspapers, a copy editor at Business Week, and a freelance writer. After CJR, he continued teaching at the J-school alongside several faculty members, including Michael Shapiro, Daniel Alarcon, and Alyson Martin.

    He is the editor of the Delacorte Review, a home for longform narrative nonfiction, and recently edited another book, “The Last Letter: A Father’s Struggle, a Daughter’s Quest, and the Long Shadow of the Holocaust,” by Karen Gordon.

    Mike grew up in Kansas City and lives in northern Connecticut with his wife, Mary Ellen Schoonmaker, the other co-director of the Writing Center.

  • Michael Grabell is a reporter for ProPublica, where he has produced stories for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, Vice, Univision and CBS News. His work typically focuses on economic issues, labor, immigration and trade. He has reported on the ground from more than 30 states, as well as some of the remotest villages in Alaska and Guatemala.

    In 2016, he received a Gerald Loeb Award for business journalism and an IRE Medal for investigative reporting for a series on the dismantling of workers' comp systems across the country. His stories on the growth of temp work helped spur new laws in California and Illinois and won the ASNE award for reporting on diversity. And in 2018, his stories on retaliation against immigrant workers won the Aronson Award for social justice journalism.

    Grabell is the author of two books: a narrative history of President Obama's attempts to revive the economy called Money Well Spent? and the poetry chapbook Macho Man, which won the Finishing Line Press competition in 2013. He started his journalism career writing obituaries for the Daily Record in Parsippany, N.J.

  • Mia Hariz is a video journalist who has previously worked for CNN, CNN+, BBC Reel and the United Nations. Presently, she teaches at her alma mater, the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. At BBC Reel, the BBC’s site for premium video content, Mia produced individual documentary shorts and oversaw entire series. She led research, conducted interviews, and edited footage on topics including sustainability, creativity and psychology. Before CNN+’s shutdown, Mia assisted in pitching, researching, scripting and editing short-form, live programs. The year prior, she interned with CNN Digital Productions, where she worked on producing and editing mini documentaries for CNN’s daily “Go There” show. In 2020, Mia earned her master’s degree from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where she now teaches visual storytelling as an Adjunct Professor, advising graduate students on proper camera operation, development of narrative structure, non-linear editing, and post-production techniques.

  • Merrill Perlman is a consultant who works with news organizations, private companies and foundations, journalism organizations and writers and editors, helping them to communicate with clarity. She spent 25 years at The New York Times in jobs ranging from copy editor to director of copy desks, in charge of all 150-plus copy editors at The Times. She is also a freelance editor of books, long-form journalism and other informational content.

    Before going to The Times, she was a copy editor and assistant business editor at The Des Moines Register. Before that, she was a reporter and copy editor at The Southern Illinoisan newspaper. She has a bachelor of journalism degree from the University of Missouri and a master of arts in mass communication from Drake University.

  • Melvin Mencher, professor emeritus, taught at the Graduate School of Journalism from 1962 to 1990 after working for the United Press and newspapers in New Mexico and California. He has covered Central America as a special correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor. Mencher has also taught at the University of Kansas and Humboldt State University. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and is the author of "News Reporting and Writing," now in its 12th edition.

  • Meg Kissinger is an investigative reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel who specializes in writing about mental illness. Her work on the abysmal housing conditions of people with chronic mental illness led to the creation of more than 600 new housing units in Milwaukee. She has been honored with two George Polk awards, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel.

    In 2009, Kissinger and Susanne Rust were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting for their work uncovering the government’s failure to protect the public from dangerous chemicals in everyday products. Those stories won several awards, including the Oakes Award and the National Journalism Award for Public Service.

    Before coming to Milwaukee, Kissinger covered criminal and civil courts for The Cincinnati Post and was a general assignment reporter at the Watertown (NY) Daily Times. She was named Wisconsin Watchdog of the Year in 2015.

    She graduated from DePauw University with a degree in political science.

  • Matthew Rose is an editorial director for New York Times Opinion, where as part of the section’s senior leadership team he oversees guest essays and video. Previously, he was a decorated editor and reporter at The Wall Street Journal based in London, Washington D.C., and New York. From 2015 to 2023, he was the Journal’s chief enterprise editor, where he helped oversee the newsroom’s most ambitious coverage, from daily news features to projects that won Pulitzer, Polk and Loeb awards. Notable examples include coverage of Donald Trump’s payoffs to Stormy Daniels and the Facebook Files series that revealed how much the platform knew about the harm it causes.

    Previously, Rose was an editor in Washington, including as deputy bureau chief, where he helped lead coverage of some of the biggest stories from that period, including the financial crisis, the Obama presidency and wars in Syria and Afghanistan. He was also an editor on the Page One desk, a media reporter in New York and a technology reporter in London. Born in London, he was educated at Oxford University and Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and currently teaches at the Columbia University School of Journalism.

  • Matt Rocheleau is an editor at Hearst overseeing data and investigations for the Times Union in Albany and a network of about 20 daily and weekly newspapers in Connecticut. Prior to starting in that role in May 2021, he was a reporter at The Boston Globe for a decade, most recently a member of the Spotlight Team. At the Globe, Rocheleau led a year-long investigation that uncovered repeated failures to keep problem drivers off the road had cost lives. The project prompted immediate change at DMVs and courts across the country and won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting. He has spearheaded numerous other long-term and rolling investigations, using hard-fought public records, tips from sources and detailed data analysis to uncover wrong-doing and hold leaders accountable at a host of government agencies and private companies.

  • Matt Bockelman is an independent documentary director and cinematographer. Through his company, Fly’s Eye Films, Matt has directed and/or shot films for New York City Ballet, Madison Square Garden, MTV, ESPN and Sesame St. In 2015 he created the Emmy nominated 8-part documentary series, “Sesame Street. & Autism: See Amazing in All Children.” His award-winning docs have been shown internationally at film festivals including, Sundance, DOC NYC, HotDocs and Big Sky Int'l Film Festival. In addition, Fly’s Eye Films is actively involved in creating original content for non-profit organizations around New York City.

  • Mary Ellen was an award-winning editorial writer and opinion columnist for The Bergen Record newspaper in New Jersey for 20 years. In 2001, she received the Editorial Writing award from the Society of the Silurians, the distinguished New York press club. She has also been a newspaper and magazine reporter and editor, writing extensively about education, family, workplace and childcare issues. She was a copy editor at Business Week magazine and an associate editor at The Columbia Journalism Review, where she wrote a groundbreaking piece on new mothers in the newsroom and the many challenges they faced. 

    Mary Ellen also taught literature and journalism at Saint Anthony High School in Jersey City, N.J., the legendary basketball school.

    She is currently co-director of the J-school's Writing Center and a long-time Master's Project advisor. Working with students has been among the most rewarding phases of her career.

  • Marlow Stern has been the Senior Entertainment Editor of Rolling Stone since 2022. He currently presides over the magazine and website’s entertainment coverage, focusing on television, film, popular culture, sports, investigations, the adult industry, and the occasional cult. He regularly writes on these topics as well.

    Before joining Rolling Stone, Stern was the Senior Entertainment Editor of The Daily Beast and an editor and reporter for Newsweek. He also worked at Blender magazine and helped start a pair of online publications while he was an undergrad in college. He has won two National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards and has overseen award-winning coverage tackling everything from Scientology to the #MeToo movement.

    Stern earned an M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2010.

  • Mark Hansen joined Columbia Journalism School in July 2012 and took on the position of inaugural director of the east coast branch of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation. Prior to joining Columbia, he was a professor at UCLA, holding appointments in the Department of Statistics, the Department of Design Media Arts and the Department of Electrical Engineering.  He was also a Co-PI for Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, an NSF Science and Technology Center devoted to the study of sensor networks. Prior to UCLA, Hansen was a Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

    For nearly three decades, Hansen has been working at the intersection of data, art and technology. Hansen has an active art practice involving the presentation of data for the public. His work with Ben Rubin, Jer Thorp and The Office for Creative Research has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, the London Science Museum, the Cartier Foundation in Paris, and the lobbies of the New York Times building and the Public Theater (permanent displays) in Manhattan.

    In terms of his journalistic experience, Hansen has been a long-standing visiting researcher at the New York Times R&D Lab, a late-career intern at the Marshall Project, and a consultant with HBO Sports. Hansen teaches mainly advanced data analysis and computational journalism at Columbia. In 2018, Hansen’s Computational Journalism course at Columbia Journalism School contributed the original reporting for the New York Times’ piece, The Follower Factory, which exposed the bot economy behind the sale of fake followers on Twitter. In July 2018, the article was cited by Twitter as the reason for its “purge” of tens of millions of suspicious accounts.

    Hansen holds a B.S. in Applied Math from the University of California, Davis, and a Ph.D and M.A. in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley. He has been awarded eight patents and has published over 60 papers in data science, statistics and computer science.

  • Mario R. Garcia is Senior Adviser on News Design and Adjunct Professor at Columbia. He is also CEO/Founder of Garcia Media, a global consulting firm. He has been involved with the redesign and rethink of more than 700 publications in 120 countries, including The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. He came to the School of Journalism as the Hearst Digital Media Professional in Residence in 2013. 

    He is the author of 14 books, the latest of which is "The Story," a trilogy about mobile storytelling and design.

    He has been involved with the Poynter Institute’s EyeTrack Research since its start, including the most recent “EyeTrack: Tablet.”

    His awards include a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of News Design, The Journalism Medal of Honor from the University of Missouri for Distinguished Service in Journalism. In 2015, Mario became the recipient of the Columbia Scholastic Press Association’s Charles O’Malley Excellence in Teaching Award. People Magazine mentioned him among the 100 most influential Hispanics in the United States.

    Mario is an avid runner and is totally submerged in the topic of how news and information move across digital platforms.  He received his Ph.D. from the University of Miami.

  • Marguerite Holloway has written about science — including climate change, natural history, environmental issues, public health, physics, neuroscience and women in science — for publications including the New York Times, the New Yorker, Natural History, Wired and Scientific American, where she was a long-time writer and editor. She is the author of The Measure of Manhattan, the story of John Randel Jr., the surveyor and inventor who laid the 1811 grid plan on New York City, and of the researchers who use his data today (W.W. Norton, 2013). She wrote the introduction to the most recent edition of Manhattan in Maps (Dover, 2014).

    Holloway enjoys interdisciplinary teaching and often collaborates with colleagues working in documentary, photojournalism and animation — particularly in the realm of climate change storytelling. She has worked on several innovative interdisciplinary digital and data projects. She and colleagues at Columbia and Stanford universities had a Magic Grant from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation to develop Science Surveyor, a prototype for an algorithmic tool to improve science journalism. Holloway and colleagues from Fordham and Brown universities worked on The Templeton Project, a sensor-based effort to chronicle the story of New York City’s rats, funded by the Tow Center for Digital Media.

    Holloway has a B.A. in comparative literature from Brown University and an M.S. from the Journalism School. She won the Distinguished Teacher of the Year award in 2001 and a Presidential Teaching Award in 2009; the New York Observer named her one of the city’s top professors in 2014.

  • Margaret Sullivan, weekly columnist for the Guardian US, is the Executive Director for the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security. This marked her return to Columbia Journalism School, where she previously taught Audience and Engagement courses.

    In her role at the Guardian, Ms. Sullivan writes on media, politics and culture; she also served as the 2023 Jack and Pamela Egan Visiting Professor at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy and Dewitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy.

    Prior to her time at Duke University, she wrote extensively on journalism ethics and press freedom as a columnist for The Washington Post. Her work there, and as the Public Editor of the New York Times from 2012 to 2016, focused on the intersection of politics, democracy and media. She also is the former executive editor of her hometown daily newspaper, The Buffalo News, where she began as a summer intern.

    In addition to her work in journalism, Sullivan has published two books. In 2020, she introduced “Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy” (Columbia Global Reports) and in 2022 “Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-stained Life” (St. Martin’s Press). Both were  acclaimed.

  • LynNell Hancock is a reporter and writer specializing in education and child and family policy issues, who has taught journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism since 1993. She is the director of the Spencer Fellowship for Education Journalism, a program that supports the work of mid-career journalists to study at Columbia and produce significant works of journalism on education topics.

    In addition to contributing to Newsweek, Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation and The New York Times, she served on staff of The Village Voice, the New York Daily News, and Newsweek where she covered national and local education issues. She has served on the National Advisory Board of Journalism Fellowships in Child and Family Policy and Columbia University’s Institute for Child and Family Policy.

    Hancock is the author of "Hands to Work: The Stories of Three Families Racing the Welfare Clock" (2002) and contributed to "America’s Mayor" (2005) and "The Public Assault on America’s Children: Poverty, Violence and Juvenile Injustice" (2000).

    Hancock holds an M.A. in East Asian Languages and Literature and an M.S. in Journalism, both from Columbia.

    Listen to Prof. Hancock on BlogTalkRadio.

  • Liz Donovan is an investigative reporter, focused on gender, immigration and climate. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, the Intercept, AFP, Type Investigations, and more. She's a graduate of Columbia Journalism School and Science Po's École de Journalisme in Paris, France. She has worked as a Global Migration Project reporting fellow, a climate reporter for City Limits, and more recently, an investigative researcher for Ronan Farrow. She is based in New York City. 

  • Known for tales that are deeply researched and artfully told, Lisa Belkin has spent a career covering American social issues, as a daily journalist, a magazine writer and a book author.

    During nearly 30 years at The New York Times, she was variously a national correspondent (based in Houston), a medical reporter, a Contributing Writer for The New York Times Magazine, and the creator of the Life’s Work column and the Motherlode blog. She has spent the past decade in the digital realm, in senior positions at HuffPost and Yahoo News.

    Belkin is the author of four books, most recently Genealogy of a Murder: Four Generations, Three Families, One Fateful Night, which has received uniformly rave reviews including from such publications and The New York Times, NPR and The Wall Street Journal; it has been described as “riveting”, “magestically sweeping,” “hauntingly powerful,” and “a hell of a great read.”

    Her previous books were Life’s Work; Confessions of an Unbalanced Mom; First, Do No Harm; and Show Me A Hero, which was made into an HBO miniseries of the same name and nominated for, among other things: a Golden Globe, Satellite, Critics Choice and NAACP Image Award for acting; a Writers Guild and Scripter Award for best writing; and a Critics Choice and Satellite award for best miniseries.

    In other media, Belkin was the host of “Life’s Work with Lisa Belkin”, on XM Radio, as well as a regular contributor to Public Radio’s The Takeaway and NBC’s Today Show. A graduate of Princeton University, she has returned there as a visiting professor in the Humanities Council, teaching narrative non- fiction as an instrument of social change. Since 2015 she has taught reporting, writing and narrative non-fiction at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

  • Lila Hassan, M.S. Stabile ‘20, is an award-winning independent investigative journalist who covers extremism, immigration, and human rights for a variety of media, including print, documentary, television, and radio. She has worked on projects that have gone on to win the Pulitzer Prize and Polk Awards as well as nominations for Emmys, a Peabody Award, and a Columbia DuPont award. 

    Her work has been published in The New York Times, ProPublica, The Guardian, FRONTLINE PBS, HuffPost National, Reuters, The Trace, Kaiser Health News, and more. After starting her career in human rights investigations, she pivoted to journalism and has reported from Cairo, Istanbul, Paris, and New York. 

    She holds a bachelor's degree in political science with honors from CUNY Brooklyn College, where she was in The Scholars Program, and a Master of Science from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism's specialized Toni Stabile Center for investigative reporting, where she was a Lorana Sullivan fellow. She has also studied international affairs and law at Université de Paris X - Nanterre. 

    She lives in New York and speaks Arabic and French. In her spare time, she is working on learning Spanish.

  • Léo Hamelin is a filmmaker and director who works both in the United States and internationally. Until recently, she was the Head of Documentaries at Brut. America, where she led a small team in creating impactful, character-driven documentaries across the U.S. Léo's work seeks to foster empathy through intimate, first-person narratives. She has produced 30 short documentaries on topics including addiction, death, immigration, subcultures, and the environment, reaching millions of viewers worldwide.

    She served as a bilingual Producer on a sports docuseries set to be released on Netflix in the fall of 2024. Her journalism has appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic, BBC, TIME, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Vox, and more.

    Previously, she worked with Blue Chalk Media, where she directed the New Yorker documentary "Quiet No More," which received the National Magazine Award and premiered at DOC NYC. She also directed the New Yorker documentary "The People's Newspaper," which received a Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting Grant. Additionally, she produced non-fiction videos and campaigns for clients such as Pearson, Freedom House, Lyft, Nike, Morgan Stanley Sustainable Solutions Collaborative, Bloomberg Philanthropies, PepsiCo Foundation, Carnegie Foundation, and more.

    As a recipient of the 2018 Adelante Fellowship from the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF), she reported from the U.S.-Mexico border. Her work was published by the BBC and the Tampa Bay Times. Her illustrated essay about life at the border was published by BuzzFeed News. In 2017, she was awarded a European Journalism Centre grant for Innovation in Development Reporting to cover gender equality in Rwanda.

    Léo was born into a French family and grew up in Brazil and Thailand. She studied in France, Mexico, and Hong Kong, and has traveled to over 45 countries.

    She regularly teaches online documentary courses at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, where she earned a Master's Degree in 2012 and served as a Digital Media Fellow in 2013. Prior to that, she earned a B.A. in Politics ('09) and a Master's Degree in Journalism ('11) from Sciences-Po Paris.

  • 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.

  • Kim Barker is a reporter on the investigations team at The New York Times. Until January 2018 she was a reporter on the metro desk, focusing on affordable housing in New York City. Before joining The Times in mid-2014, Ms. Barker was an investigative reporter at the online nonprofit ProPublica, writing mainly about campaign finance. In late 2009 and early 2010, Ms. Barker was the Edward R. Murrow press fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, where she focused on Pakistan and Afghanistan and United States policy. She was the South Asia bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune from 2004 to 2009. Her book, "The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan," published by Doubleday in 2011, later became the basis for the movie "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot." Before joining the Tribune, Ms. Barker worked for The Seattle Times, The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., and The Times in northwest Indiana. She has won investigative-reporting awards from organizations such as Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Society of Professional Journalists, and Best of the West.

  • Kholood Eid is a Palestinian American documentary photographer, filmmaker and educator based in New York. She was part of the team at the Times that won the 2020 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Journalism Award for their series investigating online child sexual abuse.

  • Kevin has written for a variety of magazines and newspapers, including the Asbury Park Press and The New York Times, for which wrote a weekly column about New Jersey. He has been teaching at the school since 2000, and has twice been chosen Distinguished Teacher of the Year. He is the author of "A Day in the Night of America," "Domers: A Year at Notre Dame," and the recipient of the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for "Marching Home: To War and Back with The Men of One American Town." He received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. 

  • Keren Blankfeld is an award-winning journalist with a special interest in narrative nonfiction. Her stories have appeared in the New York Times, Forbes, Reuters, The Toronto Star, and others. Her first book,Lovers in Auschwitz: A True Story will be published through Little, Brown in January 2024 and is being translated to multiple languages. A former editor and staff writer at Forbes, Keren has been a guest on CNN, BBC World News, and E! Entertainment. In 2013, Keren served as a creative executive at New Regency Productions, where she worked with screenwriters and playwrights to develop material for movies and TV shows. She holds a B.A. in International Relations and English from Tufts University and an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University. Originally from São Paulo, Brazil, Keren spent her teenage years in Houston, Texas. She now lives in New York with her husband and two sons.

  • Ken Brown is the financial enterprise editor for The Wall Street Journal. In that role he oversees investigations and special projects on topics of deep interest to Journal readers. Ken has years of experience in financial investigations, including launching the Journal’s award-winning coverage of the $4 billion financial fraud involving Malaysia’s government-investment fund 1MDB, one of the biggest thefts in history.

    Before his current role, Ken was the editor of Heard on the Street, the Journal’s home for commentary and analysis on business, markets and the economy. Ken revamped the Heard’s coverage to focus on global issues, improved mobile presentation and boosted traffic. He introduced multi-part series on urgent topics and long-form Heards, leveraging the expertise of his global staff, which is based in New York, San Francisco, Hong Kong and London.

    Ken returned to New York in 2016 after nearly five years in Asia where he ran the Journal’s Hong Kong bureau and its regional finance and markets coverage. In Asia, Ken oversaw coverage of China’s financial system and in 2013, led the Journal’s series China’s Rising Risks. The series highlighted the potential problems caused by China’s rapidly rising debt and distorted economy well before these became global financial concerns. Ken also ran coverage of the 2014 Hong Kong protests and the hiring of Chinese princelings by western investment banks. >

    Before moving to Asia, Ken ran the Journal’s finance and markets coverage during and after the financial crisis. Over that period, the Journal won numerous awards for its coverage of Wall Street and markets.

    Ken first joined the Journal as a reporter in 2000. He has overseen the Journal's real estate coverage and reported on tech and markets. As a Heard on the Street columnist from 2001 to 2004, he wrote about the collapse of Arthur Andersen and scandals involving Nortel, Enron and others.

    In a detour from journalism, Ken worked as a principal at Pzena Investment Management, a value-oriented investment firm. He has also worked at The New York Times, Smart Money magazine and The Washington Post. He graduated from SUNY Binghamton and Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.

     

  • Keith Gessen is a founding editor of n+1 and a contributor to The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and the London Review of Books. He is the editor of three nonfiction books and the translator or co-translator, from Russian, of a collection of short stories, a book of poems, and a work of oral history. He is also the author of two novels, All the Sad Young Literary Men and A Terrible Country, as well as a book of essays, Raising Raffi.

    Most of Gessen's journalistic work has focused on the effects of the collapse of communism on the countries of what used to be the Soviet Union. His New Yorker article on the insoluble problem of Moscow traffic -- a legacy of militant Soviet urban design combined with the anti-planning ethos of hypercapitalism — was included in Best American Travel Essays in 2011. His New Yorker story on the opening to shipping of the Northern Sea Route above the Russian Arctic as a result of global warming was included in Best American Science and Nature Writing in 2013. He has written about the wars and revolutions in Ukraine, as well about the experts in the U.S. government who work on the region.

    Gessen began his career as a book reviewer for the early online magazine FEED, and subsequently contributed review-essays to DissentThe Nation, and The New York Review of Books. He started n+1 with Mark Greif, Chad Harbach, Benjamin Kunkel, Allison Lorentzen, and Marco Roth in 2004.

    Gessen was born in Moscow and grew up outside of Boston. He graduated from Harvard with a B.A. in History and Literature in 1998, and subsequently received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Fiction) from Syracuse University. In 2014-2015 he was a fellow at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library.

  • Justin Elliott has been a reporter with ProPublica, where he covers business and politics, since 2012.

    In 2023, he and colleagues revealed how a set of politically connected billionaires provided lavish gifts and travel to Supreme Court justices over many years. Those stories won the Pulitzer Prize gold medal for public service. 

    He was previously on the team of reporters documenting how the rich avoid taxes for “The Secret IRS Files” series. He co-wrote a story revealing how tech mogul Peter Thiel turned a Roth IRA into a multibillion-dollar tax haven.

    His work has spurred congressional investigations and changes to federal law. His coverage of TurboTax-maker Intuit’s misleading marketing tactics led to a settlement delivering $141 million back to consumers.

    His work has won numerous awards. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, he has won a George Polk Award, the Selden Ring Award and a Gerald Loeb Award for business journalism. His stories have been published and aired in outlets including The New York Times and NPR. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Brown University in history and classics.

  • June Cross is a winner of the duPont-Columbia Journalism Award, a National Emmy and a 2021 Peabody Award. Her career has highlighted stories of the dispossessed and the intersection of race, politics and public health. She is best known for "Secret Daughter", an autobiographical documentary made in 1996 which was later developed into a memoir by the same name.

    She began her career as an intern at The Boston Globe and PBS' flagship station, WGBH. She went on to what is now PBS NewsHour, and then to CBS News, before obtaining a job as staff producer at PBS FRONTLINE, where she worked for nine years. She joined the Columbia Journalism School in 2001 and received tenure in 2006. In 2010, she founded the Documentary Specialization.

  • Judith Matloff has written about international affairs for 40 years, specializing in areas of turmoil. She is an author of four non-fiction books, and her essays have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times Magazine and Book Review, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal.

    She is currently working on a pilot comedy for HBO about war correspondents. The showrunner is Amanda Peet.

    Matloff started out in the 1980s as a reporter for the Mexico City News covering political upheaval in that region. She then spent a decade at Reuters reporting across Europe and Africa and went on to head the Africa and Moscow bureaus of the Christian Science Monitor. Stories included the demise of apartheid, various wars and the rise of Vladimir Putin.

    Matloff’s latest book, "How to Drag a Body and Other Safety Tips You Hope to Never Need," is a manual for pretty much every danger a journalist can face. She earlier published "No Friends But the Mountains," which explores the link between conflict and geography, "Fragments of a Forgotten War," about Angola’s war and "Home Girl," which chronicled a Harlem Street.

    Matloff is the senior safety advisor of the university’s Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. She has pioneered security protocols and training for media around the world. Clients have included NBC, the UN, Society of Professional Journalists, Doc Society, Magnum, State Department, VICE, The Guardian, Society of Environmental Journalists, Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, International Women’s Media Foundation and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

    Matloff has a B.A. from Harvard. Her work has won fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the Fulbright Program (twice in Mexico), the Hoover Institution (Stanford University), SAJA and the Logan Nonfiction Program.

  • Juanita Ceballos is a documentary producer and filmmaker with extensive experience working in the U.S. and abroad, with bylines in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador, Venezuela, and Ukraine. She has covered sensitive topics, including Colombia’s civil conflict, police brutality in the United States, and the refugee crisis in Venezuela. Her work has appeared on FRONTLINE, VICE, HBO, Showtime, Telemundo, Al Jazeera, Univision, NBC News, TIME, Narratively, and The New York Times. Juanita is a graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she has been working as an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Journalism since 2015.

  • Juan Manuel Benítez has worked as a New York City-based bilingual journalist for more than two decades, covering politics, climate change, and the Latino community.

    In 2003, he joined NY1 News as a reporter, launching its Spanish-language sister station, NY1 Noticias. There, he launched and anchored the current affairs show, Pura Política, and the weekly podcast Off Topic/On Politics. Both stations are part of Spectrum News, a network of more than 30 local news and regional sports channels.

    Benítez has extensively covered the administrations of mayors Michael Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio, and Eric Adams, as well as countless political campaigns, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s 2008 primary for the Democratic presidential nomination and the 2016 presidential election. He has also served as a moderator and panelist in many electoral debates.

    Over the years, Benítez has also worked as a guest host for WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show and as a columnist for publications like El Diario La Prensa. He has also been a political commentator for MSNBC, NTN 24 and other outlets, and has served as a member of the jury for the Gabo Awards. He started his career in journalism as a reporter for Hispanic Market Weekly.

    For more than a decade, he was an adjunct professor at CUNY’s Craig Newmark School of Journalism, where he designed its bilingual program.

    His climate change coverage has taken him to places like The Netherlands and has earned him a New York Emmy Award. He is also the recipient of the HOLA Excellence in TV Award, The New York Press Club Award and The New York State Associated Press Association Award. He came to New York as a La Caixa fellow.

    Benítez has a master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a bachelor’s degree in Anglo-German Language and Literature from the University of Extremadura. He has also been a student at the University of Heidelberg, the University of Lisbon, and Kalamazoo College.

    Born in Badajoz, Spain, he lives in Harlem with his husband, Tazjuan Starr.

  • Juan Arredondo is a Colombian-American documentary photographer and filmmaker who has chronicled human rights issues and social and armed conflicts throughout Latin America, Ukraine and the US. He’s a regular contributor to The New York Times and National Geographic. His photographs have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, and aired on ESPN , PBS, and HBO, among others. For his work, he has been awarded a World Press Photo, Overseas Press Club, ICRC Humanitarian Visa D’Or Award, among others. Arredonod is a Columbia University Journalism School graduate and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. 

    Arredondo has been a visiting professor of visual journalism at Arizona State University Cronkite School of Journalism and teaches photojournalism, multimedia, sound and video at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism since 2021.

  • Jonathan Weiner grew up around science — his father was a scientist at Columbia. He majored in English at Harvard, and then stumbled into an editing job at the magazine The Sciences, where, to his own surprise, he fell in love with science writing. After five years, Jonathan left the magazine to write his first book, “Planet Earth,” the companion volume to a PBS television series. He wrote books for the next 20 years and joined Columbia in 2005.

    Jonathan’s book “The Beak of the Finch” won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science. His other books include “Time, Love, Memory,” a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction, and a finalist for the Aventis Science Prize; and “His Brother's Keeper,” a finalist for Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His latest book, “Long for This World,” was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

    Jonathan has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Slate, and many other places. Before Columbia, he taught writing at Princeton, Rockefeller University and Arizona State University. His book research has received support from NASA, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

  • Jonathan Thirkield's work explores the boundaries between the human language systems of poetry and code—as forms of expression and as structural models for being. He has worked as an independent Web developer for arts and media outlets over a decade, and he has taught poetry at colleges and universities including the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Deep Springs College. He teaches courses in computational media and digital arts at the New School's Graduate Media Studies Program, Parson's Design and Technology MFA program, and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism MS Data program. 


    His first collection of poetry, The Waker's Corridor, won the 2008 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. His next of collection, Infinity Pool, will be published by the University of Chicago Press' Phoenix Poets series in the fall of 2024. His interactive work has been accessioned into the Rhizome ArtBase, and his recent writing has appeared in Conjunctions, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. To view some of his interactive projects go to floatingmedia.com

  • Jonathan Soma is a programmer and educator who focuses on making unapproachable data accessible. He has made maps, processed data, and crowdsourced stories with ProPublica, WNYC, The New York Times, and others.

    In 2009 he helped create Big Apple Ed, a web application that crunched NYC school data, which was awarded third place in New York City's first annual Big Apps contest. Since then, Soma's personal projects - analyzing the Japanese census, MTA travel times and more - have been featured everywhere from Gawker to The New York Times Style section.

    In 2010 Soma cofounded the Brooklyn Brainery, a community-driven recreational school where he instructs on neuroscience, the Loch Ness Monster, and everything in between. He is also a speaker at Masters of Social Gastronomy, a monthly lecture series on culinary history, food science and culture.

    Soma earned his B.A. in Cognitive Science from the University of Virginia.

  • John Zucker was longtime Deputy Chief Counsel and Senior Vice President at ABC, Inc., where he led the group of attorneys who advise and represent ABC News and the news operations at the ABC-owned television stations on newsgathering, libel, privacy, fair use, and other First Amendment, FCC and copyright issues.  Prior to joining ABC, Zucker was Senior Broadcast Attorney at CBS Inc., working with CBS News and the CBS stations, and an associate at Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering, Washington, DC, specializing in First Amendment and FCC matters.

    Zucker is a graduate of Yale Law School and Yale College, where he was editor-in-chief of the Yale Daily News. 

    Zucker has been an adjunct professor teaching media law courses at the Columbia School of Journalism since 1999.  Prior to that, he was a visiting lecturer teaching a media law seminar course at Yale College for seven years.  Zucker has appeared frequently as a guest speaker or panelist at legal workshops and at law school and college media law classes. 

    Before attending law school, Zucker worked as a reporter at the Wilton (Ct.) Bulletin and at the Associated Press bureau in Hartford, CT and as a copy editor at the Buffalo Evening News. 

  • Dinges was in charge of the school’s radio curriculum, which he revamped to emphasize public radio journalism. He received a BA from Loras College and an MA in Latin American Studies from Stanford University. Dinges began his career as a reporter and copy editor for The Des Moines Register & Tribune. He was a freelance correspondent in Latin America for many years, during the period of military governments and civil wars in South and Central America, writing for Time, The Washington Post, ABC Radio, The Miami Herald and other news organizations.

    On his return to the United States, he worked as assistant editor on the foreign desk at The Washington Post. He joined National Public Radio as it was building up its foreign coverage, serving as deputy foreign editor and managing editor for news.

    He is the author of "The Condor Years: How Pinochet and his Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents" (The New Press 2004). His other books include "Assassination on Embassy Row" (1980), "Our Man in Panama: The Shrewd Rise and Brutal Fall of Manuel Noriega" (1990), "Sound Reporting: The National Public Radio Guide to Radio Journalism and Production" (as co-editor and co-author) (1992), and "Independence and Integrity: A Guidebook for Public Radio Journalism" (co-editor) (1995).

    His awards include the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for excellence in Latin American reporting, the Latin American Studies Media Award, and two Alfred I. du Pont-Columbia University Awards (as NPR Managing Editor).

    Listen to Prof. Dinges on BlogTalkRadio.

  • Joanne Faryon is an award-winning investigative journalist, producer and podcaster. She specializes in long-form, investigative multimedia projects. She has reported in Canada and the U.S. for both regional and national news outlets. Faryon teaches reporting and Shoe Leather: An Investigative Podcast.

    Faryon’s work has been published and broadcast in the Los Angeles Times, The National Post, CBC National Radio News, CBC TV’s The National, CBC Newsworld, the PBS NewsHour, NPR and across public media stations in California.

    Faryon is the creator and host of the investigative podcast "Room 20," a production of the LA Times Studios. It’s the story of an undocumented migrant who spent 15 years on life support in a California nursing home, unconscious and unidentified. It debuted in the U.S. and Canada at number one on the Apple podcast charts and remained at the top of the charts for weeks. She is the story editor of a new hit podcast released by Warner Media about the life and work of renowned film director Peter Bogdanovich. Faryon is currently working with Warner on a podcast about the life of Lucille Ball.

    In her project, "Impossible Choice," Faryon exposed California’s “vent farms” – special nursing home units where thousands of people spend years on life support. In her documentary, "Life in Prison: The Cost of Punishment," she went inside three California prisons to document how sentencing laws contribute to an aging, sick, and expensive prison population. She chronicled the final weeks of an 89-year-old man dying of heart disease when examining why one of the country’s most respected hospices was being investigated for Medicare fraud. She was the first journalist to report on immunized people getting sick with whooping cough during the 2010 California epidemic and raise questions about the efficacy of the vaccine. Her documentary, "When Immunity Fails: The Whooping Cough Epidemic," was the result of an international partnership with KPBS, inewsource.org, and Radio Netherlands Worldwide.

    Faryon’s work has been awarded Columbia’s Meyer Berger Award for in-depth human interest reporting and an Investigative Reporters and Editors first place in the multi-platform category. She has been honored with nine Edward R. Murrow awards, two Emmys, a Golden Mike for investigative reporting and has twice received a National Award for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. Her work has also been recognized by USC’s Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in television political journalism, the Webby Awards, the Podcast Academy and by the Manitoba Human Rights Commission for Meritorious Service for continued coverage on the extreme right and the Ku Klux Klan in Canada.

  • Jimmy So is the editor of Columbia Global Reports, a publishing imprint from Columbia University that commissions authors to produce works of original thinking and on-site reporting from all over the world, on a wide range of topics. He has commissioned and edited authors such as Masha Gessen, Bill Keller, Harriet A. Washington, Margaret Sullivan, Bethany McLean, Tim Wu, Roxane Gay, Edmund Morris, Jonathan Schell, Clay Shirky, Gish Jen, and Sasha Issenberg, among many others.

    He is a regular film and book critic and was a culture and books editor at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, where he contributed many film, book, television, and music criticism, and won a National Magazine Award as part of the books team for his reviews. His work has also appeared in The New YorkerThe New Republic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Chronicle of Higher Education, CBS News, and other publications. He has worked for The New Yorker, CBS News, and KUOW radio. He was a classical music critic for The Seattle Times, and a news anchor and senior editor at the Hong Kong television stations TVB and ATV, where he covered the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and the Beijing Olympics. He is writing a book about the early friendship of two Chinese film directors. He is a graduate of the MA program at Columbia in the arts and culture concentration, where he won the Pulitzer traveling fellowship.

  • Jennifer Vanasco is an editor on the NPR Culture Desk, where she also reports on theater, visual arts, cultural institutions, the intersection of tech/culture and the economics of the arts.

    She previously worked at Member station WNYC in New York, where for almost nine years, she wore many hats — Arts & Culture Desk editor, evening news editor, fill-in host and newscaster, regular contributor to the arts show "All of It" and award-winning arts reporter. She teaches audio journalism in Columbia University's journalism graduate program and is on the faculty of the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center National Critics Institute.

    Before audio journalism, she was editor in chief of MTV's 365Gay.com, which at the time was the country's largest LGBTQ+ news site; created and wrote the Minority Reports column for Columbia Journalism Review; and for over a decade was a syndicated newspaper columnist on gay issues.

    She has received many awards for her work, including the New York Radio Festivals Silver Award, the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association Excellence in Radio Award, the National Headline Award, the Peter Lisagor Award, plus awards from the Associated Press, the New York State Broadcasters Association, the Webbys and others. She graduated from Wellesley College.

  • Jennifer Jo Janisch is an award-winning reporter, producer, and filmmaker. She is an executive producer of an upcoming multi-episode Netflix series, and most recently produced "Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror," a five-part Netflix series (Sept. 2021), directed by Brian Knappenberger. She also co-produced the twice Emmy-nominated, two-part HBO film "Agents of Chaos" (Sept. 2020) about Russian interference in the 2016 election, directed by Alex Gibney.

    She spent eight years contributing original investigative reporting to the CBS Evening News and CBS This Morning. She won Emmys in 2018 (Air Force Academy sexual assault) and 2017 (Wounded Warrior Project charity) in the Investigative Reporting category. Her work received a second place National Headliners Award and an honorable mention from the White House Correspondents Association (Air Force Academy, 2018) and she was a finalist for the 2016 Scripps Howard investigative reporting award (Wounded Warrior Project, 2017).

    She spent the early part of her time on the CBS News investigative team investigating the healthcare of veterans, and the consequences of war on civilians and culture heritage in the Middle East. She also contributed reporting in countless breaking news events. Her past stories were among those honored with a 2015 Edward R. Murrow Award for Continuing Coverage of the War Against ISIL, and the investigative team of which she was a member won the 2014 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for its coverage of the Sandy Hook massacre. She has shared six other Emmy nominations for her contributions in the news and documentary field.

    Before joining CBS News, Janisch worked on a five-part series for PBS “Wide Angle” called “Women, War & Peace," which won the 2011 Overseas Press Club award for best television documentary on international affairs, the 2012 Gracie Award for outstanding series, and a 2012 Television Academy Honors award. Janisch associate-produced an hour-long documentary for the series about the armed conflict in Colombia called "The War We Are Living," which won the 2011 Overseas Press Club award for Best Latin America reporting.

    She began her career in the summer of 2009 as an intern at CBS News “60 Minutes," where she contributed research to an investigation by Lesley Stahl into the increasing reliance by some state governments on casino revenue.

  • Jelani Cobb joined the Columbia 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, Policing the Police and THE RIOT REPORT.

    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 the Board of Trustees of the New York Public Library. He received an Honorary Doctorate for the Advancement of Science and Art from Cooper Union in 2022, and an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Rutgers University in 2024. York College / CUNY and Teachers College have honored Dr. Cobb with medals.

    Dr. Cobb was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2023.

  • Jasmine Cui is a reporter at NBC News. Previously, she worked as a data scientist in domains ranging from accounting to telecommunications.

  • Janmaris Perez, '20 M.S., is a journalist and audio producer specializing in narrative news and non-fiction podcasts. She is currently an Associate Producer at MSNBC Audio where she assists in the production of several award winning series, including Rachel Maddow Presents: Déjà News, Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra, Prosecuting Donald Trump, How to Win 2024, Into America and Why Is This Happening?The Chris Hayes Podcast. Her work has been recognized and awarded the Adweek Political Podcast of the Year, Webby Award for Crime & Justice and the Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism. She previously worked at StoryCorps where she produced for NPR's Morning Edition and the StoryCorps Podcast

    She holds a bachelor's degree in Digital Media/Communication Studies with honors from Florida State University, and a Master of Science from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. 

    She lives in Astoria, Queens and enjoys local stand-up comedy shows in her spare time. 

  • Jamie Roth is an Emmy award-winning on-air news reporter who has worked for TV stations across the country. Over the past 20-plus years, Roth has covered major stories of national and local interest. She’s also worked as a freelance video news producer and print reporter for Business Insider.

    Roth has taught at Columbia since 2015.

  • James B. Stewart was the Bloomberg professor of business journalism. He taught in the business section of the M.A. program. 

    He is the author of eleven books, including the national best-seller, “DisneyWar,” an account of Michael Eisner's tumultuous reign at America's best known entertainment company. He is also the author of national bestsellers “Den of Thieves,” about Wall Street in the 80s, “Blind Eye”, an investigation of the medical profession, and “Blood Sport”, about the Clinton White House. “Follow the Story: How to Write Successful Nonfiction,” was inspired by his classes at Columbia. “Heart of a Soldier,” named the best non-fiction book of 2002 by Time magazine, recounts the remarkable life of Rick Rescorla, a victim in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. His most also authored “Tangled Web.”

    He wrote for the New York Times and contributed regularly to The New Yorker. He was formerly "Page One" Editor of The Wall Street Journal.

    Stewart is the recipient of a 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Wall Street Journal articles on the 1987 stock market crash and the insider trading scandal. He is also the winner of the George Polk award and two Gerald Loeb awards. “Blind Eye” was the winner of the 2000 Edgar Allan Poe Award given annually by the Mystery Writers of America. In 2005, “DisneyWar” was named a finalist for the first annual Financial Times/Goldman Sachs business book of the year award.

    Stewart is a graduate of Harvard Law School and DePauw University. He was born and attended public schools in Quincy, Illinois.

  • James G. Robinson has spent nearly two decades at The New York Times, where he helps the company use data to better understand its audience. He has taught expository writing at NYU and is currently an adjunct professor at Columbia Journalism School. 

    In 2017, his article “Road to Recovery” was featured on the front page of the Times’ Sunday Travel section. Describing a road trip his family took after the death of his five-year-old son, the piece was selected as a notable essay in The Best American Travel Writing 2018 and inspired him to write his debut memoir, More Than We Expected, published by Post Hill Press in November 2023.

    A native New Yorker, James lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Tali, and their two surviving sons.

  • Jim Mintz is an adjunct professor in the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism in the Columbia Journalism School and the president of the Mintz Group, a research and investigative firm. He has spent thirty years conducting investigations all over the world. He helped pioneer the use of sophisticated resources by law firms in the 1970s as an in-house investigator at a Washington, D.C. law firm.

    In 1980, Newsweek said about their unique in-house group: "What sets [them] apart— and a few others around the nation — is their ability to take comprehensive looks at complicated situations and make sense out of them." His articles include “Harassment 101: How to Handle Complaints” for The Wall Street Journal, "Strategies for Managing Complex Corporate Investigations” for the Practicing Law Institute, and “Background Checking on BoardCandidates" for Directors & Boards.

    Two of Jim's notable assignments recently:

    He was the chief investigator for the Connecticut legislative committee that considered the impeachment of Governor John Rowland. Jim testified for days at televised hearings, during one of which Rowland resigned.

    Jim also worked on behalf of New York City on the issue of how handguns are distributed, sold and get into the hands of criminals.

  • Jake Price is a filmmaker, photographer, and producer of immersive documentaries. A focus of his work is the intersection of climate change with cultural and ecological systems, emphasizing long-term storytelling that captures the deep connections between land, culture, science, and community. An Ochberg Fellow at Columbia Universities’ Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, coping with and understanding trauma are also significant themes that run throughout his work.

    He began his photographic career in Kosovo 1999. He has worked on assignments for, and his work appears in, publications worldwide, including The New York Times, National Geographic, TIME, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal,  Rolling Stone, Orion Magazine, Newsweek, Le Monde II, Japan Contemporaries, and others.

    Over the past two decades, he has navigated the evolving media landscape, marked by the decline of print media and the rise of digital platforms. By embracing new technologies and storytelling formats, he has remained at the forefront of evolving journalism. His present work is characterized by the blending of traditional photojournalism and innovative digital storytelling, integrating photographs, audio recordings, video, and written narratives that result in multi-layered experiences.

    His immersive documentary projects include Unknown Spring, which documented the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan and received top honors from the World Press Photo Foundation. This was followed by The Invisible Season, a POV funded web documentary that focused on the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, which was nominated for a Webby Award and premiered at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center.

    His photography and films are held in the private collections of The 9/11 Memorial Museum and Stony Brook University and his solo exhibits include an immersive exhibit of The Invisible Season at Lincoln Center, New York, Surviving Kosovo at The Simon Wiesenthal Center, Los Angeles, amongst many others globally. He has curated numerous exhibits, most recently as co-curator for the Maks Levin exhibit at the United Nations sponsored by The Committee to Protect Journalists.

    He holds an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College in Boston.

  • Jacob Kushner is an international journalist and author who reports from Africa, Germany, and the Caribbean. He writes underreported stories about ordinary people, illuminating how the privileged and the powerful shape, and misshape, their worlds.

    A career freelancer, Jacob’s journalism has appeared in dozens of publications including The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Economist, The Guardian, National Geographic, The Nation, VQR, The Atavist, WIRED, Foreign Policy, the ICIJ, and VICE. He has photographed for National Geographic and field-produced for VICE on HBO and PBS NewsHour.

    Originally from Milwaukee, he studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he edited the local Spanish newspaper and reported an award-winning series about Mexican dairy farm workers who were transforming rural life and politics across the state.

    Jacob’s career as a foreign correspondent began in Port-au-Prince, where he conducted award-winning investigations that exposed how the U.S. was illegally deporting thousands of people to Haiti and how U.S. foreign ‘aid’ made Americans rich while keeping Haitians poor. For much of the past decade he has reported from Nairobi where, as an Overseas Press Club fellow with the Associated Press, he covered the Al-Shabab Westgate Mall terrorist attack, then investigated the ensuing extrajudicial killings of Muslim civilians by Kenyan soldiers and police.

    Jacob is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School’s MA Politics program. His master’s thesis, China’s Congo Plan, was published by the Pulitzer Center and favorably reviewed in the New York Review of Books. His reporting on the persecution of Africa’s LGBTQ refugees culminated in more than 15 articles, and a book. His latest book is Look Away: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants.

    A former Fulbright Scholar, Max Planck Journalist in Residence, and Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good, Jacob was a finalist for the Livingston Award for International Reporting. He has taught International Reporting and Migration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He speaks Dominican Spanish, Haitian Creole, conversational German, and basic French.

  • Jack Crosbie is a freelance feature writer based in New York whose work primarily focuses on politics and conflict. He's covered U.S. electoral politics, as well as domestic extremism and various subcultures, and done significant reporting overseas in Ukraine, Lebanon and Southeast Asia. Crosbie primarily writes for Rolling Stone magazine, where he is a contributing editor, and often contributes to the New York Times. His work is primarily long-form, narrative features that are adjacent to but outside the daily news cycle, rather than access-focused scoops.

  • Irene Plagianos is an award-winning journalist and producer. As a freelance investigative and enterprise reporter, Irene broke the sexual misconduct allegations against famed chef Mario Batali for Eater, covered the El Chapo trial for the Los Angeles Times and has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Vice and others. Her reporting on Batali was recently featured in the documentary, Batali: The Fall of a Superstar Chef, on Max. 

    Most recently, Irene was a producer for the Emmy-nominated Apple TV+ show, The Problem with Jon Stewart. The episode she produced on the politicized battle for transgender rights won a 2023 GLAAD Media Award. Before joining The Problem, Irene was a news producer on the final season of the Peabody Award-winning Netflix show, The Patriot Act. 

    Irene was also previously a staff writer at The American Lawyer magazine and a reporter at NYC news website, DNAinfo, where she was awarded a Tow Foundation Juvenile Justice Fellowship for her story on teens charged as adults in NYC criminal courts. Irene began her career in NYC media as a stringer for the New York Post while she attended Columbia Journalism School. She also received her BA from Columbia University.

  • Ian MacDougall is a journalist based in New York. His work has appeared in The New York Times MagazineHarper's MagazineThe Atlantic, ProPublica, and numerous other publications. A lawyer by training, he has reported on a range of subjects, among them: political corruption in Ohio, spies in Norway's far north, management consultants at Rikers Island, weaponized lawsuits in Alabama, libertarian land grabs in Honduras, and aging mobsters in Rhode Island.

  • Howard W. French is a career foreign correspondent and global affairs writer and the author of five books, including three works of non-fiction, a work of documentary photography and a book from Norton Liveright about Africa and the birth of modernity.

    He worked as a French-English translator in Abidjan, Ivory Coast in the early 1980s, and taught English literature for several years at the University of Abidjan. His career in journalism began as a freelance reporter for The Washington Post and other publications in West Africa. He joined The New York Times in 1986, and worked as a metropolitan reporter with the newspaper for three years, and then from 1990 to 2008 reported overseas for The Times as bureau chief for Central America and the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, Japan and the Koreas, and China, based in Shanghai. During this time, he was twice the recipient of an Overseas Press Club Award, and his work has received numerous other awards.

    From 2005 to 2008, alongside his correspondence for The Times, French was a weekly columnist on global affairs for the International Herald Tribune. 

    His most recent non-fiction book, titled Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, was published by Norton/Liveright in October 2021.

    His immediate previous book, Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power, was published by Knopf in March 2017, was widely reviewed and featured by The Guardian and other publications as one of its notable books of the season.

    He is the author, previously, of China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa, published by Knopf in May 2014. China's Second Continent was named one of 100 Notable Books of 2014 by The New York Times, and was cited by The Economist, The Guardian and Foreign Affairs and several other publications as one of the best books of 2014.

    He is also the author of A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), which was named non-fiction book of the year by several newspapers.

    His book of documentary photography, Disappearing Shanghai: Photographs and Poems of an Intimate Way of Life, was published in 2012 (Homa & Sekey). It was produced in collaboration with the Chinese poet and novelist, Qiu Xiaolong. The photography from this project has figured in solo and group exhibitions on three continents and has been acquired in both museums and private collections.

    French was a 2011-12 fellow of the Open Society Foundations. Other awards include an honorary doctorate from the University of Maryland. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and since leaving the New York Times, he has also written occasional articles that newspaper, as well as for Atlantic magazine, Guardian Longreads, the Wall Street Journal (book reviews), The Times Literary Supplement, Bookforum and other publications.

    French speaks French, Chinese, Spanish and Japanese.

  • Helen Benedict is a novelist and journalist specializing in refugees, the effects of war on civilians and soldiers, social injustice, and on violence against women. Her most recent book, the novel, THE GOOD DEED (April 2024), her nonfiction book, MAP OF HOPE AND SORROW; STORIES OF REFUGEES TRAPPED IN GREECE, and her articles have focused on Middle Eastern and African refugees, while her earlier work covered Iraqi refugees in the U.S., American women soldiers, and sexual assault. In 2021, Benedict was awarded the 2021 PEN Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History (link is external) for her book, "Map of Hope and Sorrow." (Footnote Press, 2022).

    Benedict is credited with breaking the story about the epidemic of sexual assault of military women serving in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Her recent articles on refugees have been published in The New York Times, The Nation, Slate, Guernica, Arrowsmith Journal and elsewhere; while her work on war is reflected in her novel, "Wolf Season," (2017, Bellevue), her previous novel “Sand Queen” (2011, Soho Press) and her non- fiction book, "The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq," (2009 and 2010, Beacon Press), which won her the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism in 2013. Benedict was also named one of the “21 Leaders for the 21st Century” by Women’s eNews. In 2015, she was a finalist for the U.K. Liberty Human Rights Arts Award for her play, “The Lonely Soldier Monologues.” Her work has also won the EMMA (Exceptional Merit in Media Award) from the National Women's Political Caucus, the Ken Book Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism.

    Benedict's non-fiction book, “The Lonely Soldier,” led to a class-action suit against the Pentagon on behalf of women and men who were sexually assaulted in the military and also inspired the 2012 Oscar- nominated documentary about sexual assault in the military, “The Invisible War.” Her earlier book, “Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes” is widely taught in journalism and law schools and has helped to change the way several newspapers cover sexual assault, while her book, “Recovery: How to Survive Sexual Assault” is used by rape crisis centers around the country. She has testified twice to Congress as an expert on sexual assault in the military.

  • Haley Willis is a video journalist with the New York Times Visual Investigations team, which combines traditional reporting with digital and open source methods to break news and hold the powerful to account.  

    She has covered police brutality in Hong Kong and India, humanitarian crises in Syria and Mozambique, and forced labor in China. She co-produced “Day of Rage,” the most complete picture to date of what happened during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, and “El Chapo's Son: The Siege of Culiacán,” an episode of the Times documentary series “The Weekly.” 

    Her recent work has focused on police killings during traffic stops, civilian casualty assessments from the U.S. air war in the Middle East, Russian atrocities in Ukraine and Israel's use of extremely destructive munitions in Gaza. This and other work has shared in four Pulitzer Prizes, four George Polk Awards, three Overseas Press Club of America Awards, two Society of Publishers in Asia Awards, two Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, a Peabody Award, and a News Emmy.

    Prior to joining The Times in 2019, Willis worked as a researcher with the Human Rights Center at Berkeley Law and as a project manager with Amnesty International’s Digital Verification Corps. She also freelanced for the investigative collective Bellingcat, documenting airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen.

    Willis earned her joint B.A. in Sociology and Media Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. 

  • Ms. Blair is the author of Almost Golden: Jessica Savitch And The Selling of Television News (a New York Times bestseller); The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders And A President;and Laura Ingalls Wilder (a children’s biography). She has written on politics, business, media, design, science, and other topics for the New York Times, the New York Daily News, Politico, New York Magazine, The Week, The Observer, Esquire, Newsday, Mother Jones, Us Weekly, TV Guide, Reader’s Digest, and a wide variety of other publications. 

     

  • Gregory Khalil is the co-founder and President of Telos, a Washington D.C.-based non-profit that equips American leaders and their communities to better engage seemingly intractable conflict. Much of Telos’ work has centered on the role of faith leaders and culture shapers in America’s relationship to Israel/Palestine and the broader Middle East. Prior to founding Telos, Greg was a legal and communications adviser to Palestinian leaders on peace negotiations with Israel. Greg is also a founding member and chair of the board of directors of Narrative 4, a global non-profit that seeks to use story and media to cultivate empathy across divides. He has lectured internationally and his writing has appeared in The New York Times and The Review of Faith & International Affairs. Greg is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles and Yale Law School.

  • Golda Arthur is an audio producer, reporter and editor. Over the course of her 25-year career in journalism, she has edited and reported on breaking news, produced long-form documentaries and series, and led teams to create award-winning podcasts. Her work has been heard on the CBC, BBC and NPR.

    Her roots are in news: she began her career in audio at CBC Radio in Canada, where she was a reporter and producer. She went on to work for the BBC World Service in London, producing and then editing Newshour, the network’s flagship news program for 12 years, working on breaking news, field productions, and documentaries. In New York, where she is now based, she was an editor and producer for Marketplace, and senior producer for the award-winning technology podcast, Codebreaker. She moved from radio to podcasting in 2017, working for Vox Media, where she co-wrote and produced Land of the Giants: the Rise of Amazon, the first in a multi-year series on the power of tech companies. Moving further into tech journalism, she was also executive producer of Reset, a technology news show at Vox, before moving on to become supervising producer of Today, Explained. She is now an independent journalist and showrunner.

  • Giannina Segnini is a Professor of Professional Practice at the Journalism School at Columbia University in New York.

    Until February 2014, Segnini headed a team of journalists and computer engineers at La Nacion, Costa Rica’s newspaper. The team was fully dedicated to unfold investigative stories by gathering, analyzing and visualizing public databases. Her team processed the data and developed the interactive application for the OffshoreLeaks project, published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in 2013. She also partakes actively in the ICIJ’s Panama Papers project.

    More than fifty criminal cases against politicians, businessmen and public officials originated by its revelations were pursued by law-enforcement in Costa Rica, the United Kingdom, France, Finland and the United States, including two former presidents of Costa Rica who were found guilty of corruption charges.

    Segnini has been an ICIJ’s active member since 2007 and member of its board of advisers since 2015. Segnini is also a member of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN), Global Editors Network (GEN), Instituto de Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS) and the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation.

    Her work has garnered the Maria Moors Cabot Award (2014), the Excellence Award from the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation (2013), the Spanish Ortega y Gasset Prize (2005), the award for Best Journalistic Investigation of a Corruption Case for Latin America and the Caribbean (2005, 2006 and 2009), the highest Costa Rican award in journalism, the Pío Víquez Prize (2013) and the Jorge Vargas Gene Award, Costa Rica’s National Journalism Award (2000, 2003 and 2004), among others.

    Segnini was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University (2001-2002) and graduated as a Journalist at the University of Costa Rica. She is member of the jury for the Global Data Journalism Awards (GEN), the Gabriel García Márquez Awards and the Best Journalistic Investigation of a Corruption Case for Latin America and the Caribbean Awards.

    In the past decade she has also lectured as a guest speaker at a number of international conferences on data investigative journalism and corruption, such as the Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC), the International Anti-Corruption Conference held by Transparency International, the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) conferences, the International Press Institute, the News World Summit and the Latin American Conference on Investigative Journalism, among others.

    She has also served as a consultant for academic and international organizations around the World such as Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York, Deutsche Welle Akademie in Germany, International Academy of Journalism (Intajour) in Germany, the Master’s Program on Data Investigative Journalism and Visualization at El Mundo, Spain,; Master de Periodismo in El País, Spain,  Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Universidad Javeriana in Colombia, Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the Organization of American States (OAS), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Freedom House, Inter American Press Association (IAPA) and Grupo de Diarios de América (GDA).

    Giannina Segnini has also trained hundreds of journalists at leading media outlets in various countries around the world such as O Globo and Folha de São Paulo in Brazil, The Sun, The Sunday Times and the Times in the United Kingdom, El País in Spain, Leading European Newspapers Alliance (LENA), all media outlets in Timor-Leste, Kiev Post in Ukraine, Moscowand Orenburg in Russia, Revista Semana and El Tiempo in Colombia, El Nacional and Cadena Capriles in Venezuela, El Mercurio and MEGA in Chile, El Periódico and Siglo XXI in Guatemala, La Prensa in Panama, among others.

  • Gershom Gorenberg is a historian and journalist who has been covering Middle Eastern affairs for over three decades. He is the author, most recently, of "War of Shadows: Code Breakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East." Based on documents that remained classified for decades, War of Shadows demolishes myths of World War II and solves the mystery of the spy affair that nearly brought Rommel’s army and SS death squads to Cairo and Jerusalem. Gorenberg’s previous book was The Unmaking of Israel, a provocative examination of Israeli history and the crisis of Israeli democracy. He is also the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977, a groundbreaking portrayal of Israel’s post-1967 history, of major Israeli leaders, and of Israel-U.S. relations.

    His first book was "The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount," a close look at the role of religious radicalism and apocalyptic visions in the Mideast conflict. He co-authored The Jerusalem Report’s 1996 biography of Yitzhak Rabin, "Shalom Friend," winner of the National Jewish Book Award. Gorenberg is a columnist for The Washington Post and has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, The New Republic and in Hebrew for Ha’aretz. He was for many years the op-ed editor of The Jerusalem Report.

    Gorenberg has appeared on Sixty Minutes, Fresh Air and on CNN and BBC. He has lectured at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Carnegie Council, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Middle East Institute, the University of Oxford Middle East Centre and the University of Haifa Faculty of Law. When not in New York to teach, he lives in Jerusalem with his wife, journalist Myra Noveck. They have three children – Yehonatan, Yasmin and Shir-Raz.

  • George Miller is a longtime journalist and educator.

    He was a photojournalist and reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News, and he later published a local music magazine in Philadelphia called JUMP. His words and images have been published around the world.

    Before arriving at the Graduate School of Journalism, Miller was on the faculty of the Journalism Department at Temple University. He taught magazine writing, documentary photography, entrepreneurial journalism and a multimedia reporting class called Philadelphia Neighborhoods, as well as many other classes. From 2018 through 2021, he also served as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Temple University’s Japan Campus in Tokyo.

    He taught in summer multimedia journalism programs in Cagli, Italy, in Armagh, Northern Ireland, and in London.

    He is a graduate of Loyola University of Maryland. He earned master’s degrees at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the University of Pennsylvania. He earned his doctorate in higher education leadership from Wilmington University.

    As the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at the Journalism School, Miller’s primary duty is to ensure that students receive the best possible learning experience.

  • Gabriella Canal is a documentary filmmaker and journalist living in Brooklyn. Inspired by her upbringing in a Colombian-American household, she produces character-driven stories rooted in identity and belonging with a focus on women’s voices. She also loves highlighting the efforts of those working to improve human lives and protect the environment. As a journalist and producer, she’s worked with The Atlantic, Global Citizen, John Leguizamo’s NGL Studios and Insignia Films. Her independent work as a director, DP and editor has won a Student Academy Award, and been published in and featured by The New Yorker, The Video Consortium, New York Women in Film and Television and the National Association of Latino Independent Producers. A short documentary series she directed in 2023 on criminal justice data for Measures for Justice was Webby-nominated. In 2022, she became a Pulitzer Center Fellow and an adjunct professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

  • Ese Olumhense is an investigative reporter at The Markup, where she covers the ways that government agencies acquire and use technology.

    Before that, she was a reporter at Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, producing both digital and radio pieces on democracy and voting rights. Ese has also reported for The Guardian, City Limits, THE CITY and The Investigative Fund, among other outlets, working across range of beats including health, crime, housing, and politics.

    A native New Yorker, Ese is also an alumna of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

  • Emily Bell is founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School and a leading thinker, commentator and strategist on digital journalism.

    Established in 2010, the Tow Center has rapidly built an international reputation for research into the intersection of technology and journalism. The majority of Bell’s career was spent at Guardian News and Media in London working as an award-winning writer and editor both in print and online. As editor-in-chief across Guardian websites and director of digital content for Guardian News and Media, Bell led the web team in pioneering live blogging, multimedia formats, data and social media, making the Guardian a recognized pioneer in the field.

    She is co-author of “Post Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present” (2012) with CW Anderson and Clay Shirky. Bell is a trustee on the board of the Scott Trust, the owners of The Guardian, a member of Columbia Journalism Review’s board of overseers, an adviser to Tamedia Group in Switzerland, has served as chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Advisory Council on social media, and has served as a member of Poynter’s National Advisory Board.

    She delivered the Reuters Memorial Lecture in 2014, the Hugh Cudlipp Lecture in 2015, and was the 2016 Humanitas Visiting Professor in Media at the University of Cambridge.

    She lives in New York City with her husband and children.

  • Emily Goligoski researches consumers to help media organizations boost their revenue. She has held management roles at The Atlantic, the future of work media company Charter and the Membership Puzzle Project, a public interest research project at NYU. She was the first user experience researcher embedded in The New York Times newsroom. She is also a writer.

    Emily has focused her career on ensuring the sustainability of independent journalism, particularly in contexts where its viability is under threat. She is an adjunct professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, teaching about the business of media. 

    At Stanford Emily earned her Master's degree in Learning, Design & Technology and taught at the Stanford design institute ("d.school"), among other learning institutions. She reported for Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ) while studying journalism at Northwestern. Emily can be reached at em[at]emilygoligoski.com.

  • Ellen Gabler is an investigative reporter for The New York Times. Prior to joining The Times in 2017, she worked at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as a reporter and deputy investigations editor. 

    A native of Eau Claire, Wis., Ms. Gabler has a bachelor of business administration from Emory University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she was part of the inaugural class of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism.

    Ms. Gabler started her journalism career at the Stillwater Gazette in Stillwater, Minn. and has also been a reporter at the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal and the Chicago Tribune. 

  • Betsy West is a video journalist and filmmaker. She directed RBG (CNNFilms, Magnolia, Participant) along with CJS alum Julie Cohen ‘89. RBG, a theatrical documentary about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

    West was executive producer of the MAKERS documentary and digital project (AOL & PBS, 2012); the feature documentary The Lavender Scare (2017), and the short doc 4%: Film’s Gender Problem (Epix 2016.)  Along with her husband, filmmaker Oren Jacoby, she is a principal at Storyville Films where she co-produced Constantine’s Sword (First Run Features, 2007.)

    West joined the Columbia faculty in 2009 after working three decades in network news. As a producer and executive at ABC News, she received 21 Emmy Awards and two duPont-Columbia Awards for her work on “Nightline” and “PrimeTimeLive” and the documentary program ”Turning Point,” where she served as executive producer from 1994-1998. As senior vice president at CBS News from 1998-2005, she oversaw “60 Minutes” and “48 Hours,” and was executive in charge of the CBS documentary 9/11, winner of the Primetime Emmy Award in 2002.

    At Columbia, she taught classes in reporting, video production and documentary. She co-curated and moderated the FilmFridays screening series that brought first-run documentaries and their directors to the Journalism School.

    A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brown University, West holds a Master’s in Communications from Syracuse University. She served two terms on the Corporation of Brown University, and sat on Board of Directors of The New 42nd Street. 

  • 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.

  • Duy Linh Nguyen Tu is a journalist and documentary filmmaker, focusing on science, climate, and the environment. His work has appeared in print, online, on television, and in theaters. He is also the author of Narrative Storytelling for Multimedia Journalists (Focal Press).

    Tu is the Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of Professional Practice and teaches reporting and video storytelling courses. He is also a graduate of the program. 

  •  

    Dorian Benkoil leads Teeming Media, where he focuses on the processes that make media businesses work. A Fulbright Fellow, MBA, adjunct professor and award-winning journalist, he has been a managing editor, foreign correspondent and reporter for ABC News, AP and Newsweek, and an executive in a number of media companies, including ABC News and mediabistro. He also runs The Verticals Collective, a publishers’ group, and speaks Japanese and French. He is a top-tier judge for the Mirror Awards. As an educator, he teaches multiple media management and technology courses.

  • 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," 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

    A Girl Needs Cash

    Sammy David Jr.: My Father

    Believe in Yourself

    Starting Over

  • Dhrumil Mehta is Associate Professor in Data Journalism and Deputy Director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. As a data journalist since 2014 for the website FiveThirtyEight, Mehta helped to illuminate American attitudes and media coverage on everything from COVID-19 to the impeachment of Donald Trump to the Black Lives Matter movement.

    Mehta has produced a variety of digital-native works that utilize data-driven methods of journalistic inquiry as well as presentation. For example, when the mass shooting happened in Parkland, Florida in 2018, Mehta composed a nuanced interactive quiz to test readers’ knowledge about where Americans stand on gun policy based on polling data.

    Mehta’s analysis of data on media coverage of Hurricane Maria showed that the devastation in Puerto Rico received relatively little media coverage when compared to other natural disasters and news stories.
    Mehta also built and maintained the site’s core databases, applications and other reporting tools, including a public data repository that serves as a resource to readers, reporters and academics.

    As a Visiting Associate Professor in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, Mehta has equipped public policy students with the programming and data skills to better manage issues at the intersection of technology and governance. He also worked with graduate students at Columbia’s School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and the Journalism School to tell cartographic narratives, guiding students from idea to research, interviews, data analysis and presentation.

    Mehta holds a master’s degree in computer science from Northwestern University with a focus on artificial intelligence and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the same university.

  • Derek Kravitz is a contributing reporter at ProPublica, the New York-based investigative nonprofit. Previously, he was ProPublica’s director of research from 2016 to 2018. He was also a reporter and editor for the Greater New York section of The Wall Street Journal; a national economics writer for The Associated Press in Washington, D.C.; a local government and transportation staff writer at The Washington Post; and a crime reporter at the Columbia Daily Tribune in Missouri.

    Kravitz is a two-time Livingston Award finalist and projects he edited or reported have won prizes from the George Polk Awards, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, the Online News Association, Investigative Reporters and Editors and the Deadline Club. He has also been apart of three teams that have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.

    Kravitz was also a postgraduate research scholar at Columbia University and was a co-author of the journalism school's independent review of Rolling Stone magazine’s now-retracted campus-rape story. 

    Kravitz graduated with a bachelor of journalism degree from the University of Missouri and master’s degrees in international relations and journalism from Columbia University. He teaches investigative reporting at Columbia’s Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism.

  • Denise Ajiri is an award-winning data & investigative journalist and risk assessment analyst. Born and raised in Iran, she has had a global career and is based in New York today.

    Denise’s work frequently has an economic and cross-border span. She uses data and investigative skills to connect the dots and often to expose wrongdoing. Her work has been published in multiple outlets in the US and Europe. 

    Beyond her individual work, Denise has been a contributor to a variety of marquee cooperative journalistic efforts including the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), Univision/Columbia University, and Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). Denise is a graduate of Iran’s flagship Tehran University. She earned her Master’s at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2015 as a Stabile fellow. She returned to Columbia in 2017 as a postdoctoral research scholar. 

    Denise is a winner of the Online News Association’s MJ Bear Fellowship and continues to serve on its committee. She later received an Online News Association award for her work around Iranian elections. Denise is fluent in Persian and Assyrian and conversant in Turkish and Azeri.

  • Deborah Sontag is a Brooklyn-based writer with 35 years of experience as an investigative reporter, foreign correspondent, magazine writer and editor. She spent most of her career at The New York Times, where she reported from around the city, the country and the world.

    Sontag created the immigration beat at The Times, served as the first woman bureau chief in Jerusalem, and, with an award-winning, 18,000-word narrative on waste and bungling in the reconstruction of Ground Zero, helped pioneer the use of stand-alone sections devoted to a single story.

    She has profiled world leaders from Hugo Chávez to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and covered a broad range of subjects, which recently included Colombian death squads, Salvadoran street gangs, transgender inmates, the North Dakota oil boom and addiction treatment in Appalachia.

    Among her many commendations, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her coverage of the 2010 Haitian earthquake, and a winner of the George Polk Award for an investigation of the federal immigration agency.

    Prior to joining The Times, Sontag was a feature writer and book critic at The Miami Herald, and an education reporter at The Charleston (W. Va.) Gazette. She has been a visiting professor at Princeton University and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, and a high school French and Spanish teacher in Manhattan.

    She holds an M.S. degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and a B.A. in Romance Languages and Literature from Dartmouth College.

  • Deanna is an experienced trial lawyer and investigator whose practice focuses on white collar defense, government investigations, and complex civil litigation. She served for six years as an assistant district attorney in New York City and has tried more than two dozen cases to verdict in federal and state court.

    Deanna was a legal affairs correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and a national and breaking news reporter for the Washington Post. During her journalism career, she was part of The Post team that was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting. In 2022, Deanna received the New York Press Club Award for political reporting and the Newswoman’s Club of New York's Front Page Award for her reporting in the wake of the ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade.

  • Dave is a freelance data journalist who recently decided to leave the Bergen Record in New Jersey and branch out on his own after 18 years as co-manager, and then manager, of the newspaper's data operation. His role at The Record included maintaining a library of dozens of databases as well as developing, reporting, writing and providing interactive graphics for data-driven stories. He has won awards for articles on a broad spectrum of topics, including race-based property tax inequities, historical changes in living patterns throughout the New York City area, major league baseball player values, relationship trends revealed in personal ads and the real estate boom and bust of the past two decades.

    Prior to becoming involved in data journalism, he worked as a beat reporter covering housing, urban issues and a long-running desegregation battle in Yonkers in the 1980s and 90s.

    When he's not in front of a class or a computer, he can be found hiking the trails of America's national parks, playing on the softball fields of New York City, pursuing his love of photography or repairing antique phonographs.

  • David Hajdu is one of the most respected arts critics in America. Currently the staff music critic for The Nation, he served as music critic for The New Republic for 12 years. In a career spanning more than 30 years, he has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Harper's and other publications.

    Hajdu is the author of eight books of cultural history, criticism and fiction: Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America, Heroes and Villains: Essays on Movies, Music, Comics and Culture, Love for Sale: Pop Music in America, Adrianne Geffel: A Fiction, and A Revolution in Three Acts: The Radical Vaudeville of Bert Williams, Eva Tanguay and Julian Eltinge, a work of graphic nonfiction with art by John Carey. He is a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and four-time winner of the ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for Music Writing. His book Lush Life was named one of "Hundred Best Nonfiction Books of All Time" by The New York Times.

    His most recent book, The Uncanny Muse: Music, Art, and Machines from Automata to AI, explores the the history of automation in the arts, tracing the varied ways inventors and artists have sought to emulate mental processes, or fuse the mechanized world and the human soul, over the centuries.

    In addition to writing about music, Hajdu is a successful songwriter and librettist for concert music. His most recent project is the song cycle "The Parsonage," a work of historical nonfiction in musical form, created in collaboration with the composers Regina Carter, Ted Hearne, Sarah Kirkland Snider, and others.

    Hajdu's book in progress is a history of machine-made art, AI, and computational creativity, to be published by W.W. Norton.

    In 2022, Hajdu was appointed by President Biden to the National Council on the Humanities.

  • Daniel Alarcón began working as a journalist in 2004, first in print for Latin American outlets such as Etiqueta Negra, and later for American and European publications including Harper’s, the New York Times MagazineEl País, and Granta, where he was named a Contributing Editor in 2010. In 2012, he co-founded Radio Ambulante, a groundbreaking Spanish language podcast, the first of its kind covering Latin America with long-form narrative radio journalism. Under his leadership, Radio Ambulante has reported stories from all over the region, and partnered with outlets like Public Radio International and BBC Mundo to reach audiences across the US and worldwide.

    Alarcón’s long-form journalism has included deeply reported pieces focusing mainly on Peru, the country where he was born, with topics ranging from the rise of the new nationalist left, the book piracy industry, and the emerging democracy inside Lima’s most notorious prison,  Lurigancho. This last piece, “All Politics is Local,” was published in Harper’s in 2012, and was a finalist for a National Magazine Award that year.

    Alarcón began his career as a fiction writer. His first short story, “City of Clowns,” appeared in The New Yorker in 2003, and HarperCollins published his first collection, "War by Candlelight," two years later. His first novel, "Lost City Radio," was published in 2007, named a Best Book of the Year by critics across the country, and eventually translated into over a dozen languages. "At Night We Walk in Circles," his most recent novel, was a finalist for the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Foundation Award.

    Alarcón graduated from Columbia University in 1999 with a BA in Anthropology; he earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa in 2004.  In 2012-13, Alarcón joined the University of California Berkeley’s Graduate Journalism School as an Investigative Reporting Fellow. In 2021, he was named a MacArthur Fellow.

  • Dale Maharidge has been teaching at the journalism school since 2001; he first taught here in the early 1990s. He was a visiting professor at Stanford University for ten years and before that he spent fifteen years as a newspaperman, writing for The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Sacramento Bee, and others. He’s written for Rolling Stone, George Magazine, The Nation, Mother Jones, The New York Times op-ed page, Smithsonian, Slate, The Guardian, among others.

    Most Many of his books are illustrated with the work of photographer Michael Williamson. The first book, Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass (1985), later inspired Bruce Springsteen to write two songs; it was reissued in 1996 with an introduction by Springsteen. His second book, And Their Children After Them (1989), won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1990. Other books include Yosemite: A Landscape of Life (1990); The Last Great American Hobo (1993); The Coming White Minority: California, Multiculturalism & the Nation's Future (1996, 1999); Homeland (2004); Denison, Iowa: Searching for the Soul of America Through the Secrets of a Midwest Town (2005); Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression (2011); and Leapers, (2012); His most recent book is Bringing Mulligan Home: The Other Side of the Good War, (2013); a March 2013 release by PublicAffairs. Snowden’s Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance (with Jessica Bruder, 2020); Fucked at Birth: Recalibrating the American Dream for the 2020s (2021); and a forthcoming novel, Burn Coast. A podcast, “The Dead Drink First,” (2019) reached number one in all categories on Audible for several weeks.

    Maharidge attended Cleveland State University. He was a 1988 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

    Maharidge has held residencies Yaddo and MacDowell artist colonies.

  • Clifton Leaf served as the Editor-in-Chief of FORTUNE from 2017 to 2021. During his tenure, FORTUNE won more than 70 top journalism prizes and substantially expanded its website, newsletter, premium subscription, podcast, and virtual conference businesses. Prior to that he was FORTUNE’s deputy editor, overseeing the acclaimed print magazine. In earlier years, he was a guest editor for the New York Times op-ed page and held senior positions at the Wall Street Journal’s SmartMoney magazine and at FORTUNE.

    Cliff is also the author of the book, The Truth in Small Doses: Why We’re Losing the War on Cancer—and How to Win It (Simon & Schuster), which was named by Newsweek as one of “The Best Books About Cancer” and which earned him a Lifetime Achievement Award from the European School of Oncology “for his outstanding contribution to cancer journalism.” The founding co-chairman of FORTUNE Brainstorm Health and a member of the Board of Fellows at Stanford University School of Medicine, Cliff is currently the Global Fellow at the Ellison Institute of Technology in Los Angeles and serves on the editorial advisory board for Harvard Public Health.

    He has won numerous awards for his journalism and leadership in the anticancer effort, including the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism and the NIHCM’s Health Care Journalism Award, and he was twice named a finalist for the National Magazine Award. In 2006, Cliff delivered “Grand Rounds” at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, becoming the first and only journalist to receive that honor. He is currently writing his second book, which is due to be published by Simon & Schuster in 2025.

  • Christopher Weaver is a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. He was part of the Journal team that won a 2015 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. He's a graduate of Tulane University and the University of Maryland. Mr. Weaver joined the Journal in 2011 to cover U.S. health care companies before moving to the paper's investigations team. He's been teaching at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism since 2015.

  • Christopher Lee is a Korean-American photographer based in both San Antonio, Texas and Brooklyn, New York. His personal work focuses on issues of identity, subcultures, immigration, and the United States military. He is known for his use of lighting and style in his images as well as his sense of empathy for the people and subjects he photographs. He is most recently known for his work during the January 6th riot at the US Capitol building in Washington DC.

    Chris is frequently commissioned by the New York Times, TIME, Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and Texas Monthly. He has also contributed to New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Politico Magazine, Washington Post, The Intercept, among others.

    His commercial clients include Apple, ON Running, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), World Vision International, Innocence Project, Backcountry, Cannondale, Specialized, among others.

  • Chuck Stevens joined the adjunct faculty after more than three decades as a senior editor at Bloomberg News and a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, working in print, online and broadcast media.

    For Bloomberg, he was a New York-based enterprise editor of global features; oversaw newsletters on hedge funds, private equity and mergers and acquisitions; and edited coverage of the financial services industry. His assignments included turns as a show producer for Bloomberg Television and an editor in Hong Kong for Asia-Pacific banking news.

    With The Wall Street Journal, Stevens was a Page One feature editor and reported on financial markets in New York, the auto industry in Detroit and general assignments from the Boston bureau.

    At Columbia, he has been an instructor for Reporting and for City Newsroom, a class that publishes a multimedia online news site covering New York. He also has taught Business Reporting and is a Master’s Project advisor.

    Stevens is a graduate of Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

  • Charles Ornstein is a deputy managing editor at ProPublica, overseeing the Local Reporting Network, which works with local news organizations to produce accountability journalism on issues of importance to their communities. From 2008 to 2017, he was a senior reporter covering health care and the pharmaceutical industry. He then worked as a senior editor.

    Prior to joining ProPublica, he was a member of the metro investigative projects team at the Los Angeles Times. In 2004, he and Tracy Weber were lead authors on a series on Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, a troubled hospital in South Los Angeles. The articles won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service.

    In 2009, he and Weber worked on a series of stories that detailed serious failures in oversight by the California Board of Registered Nursing and nursing boards around the country. The work was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

    He previously worked at the Dallas Morning News, where he covered health care on the business desk and worked in the Washington bureau. Ornstein is a past president of the Association of Health Care Journalists and an adjunct journalism professor at Columbia University. Ornstein is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.

  • Carlos Sandoval is an Emmy nominated filmmaker whose work includes the award winning documentaries:  THE STATE OF ARIZONA, A CLASS APART and FARMINGVILLE.

    A writer and sometimes lawyer, Sandoval’s essays have appeared in several publications, including The New York Times. He is a Sundance and MacArthur grantee, an advisor with Columbia Journalism School, and on the advisory boards of the IDA’S Enterprise Documentary Fund and Firelight Media. Sandoval has done extensive work in public media, including serving on several funding and programming panels and as Co-Executive Director of Next Generation Leadership.  A founding member of Indie Caucus, Sandoval is currently at work on a documentary about Latinos and the criminal justice system.

    Sandoval is a native of Southern California and a graduate of Harvard College and of the University of Chicago Law School. Prior to his filmmaking career, Sandoval practiced law and worked in policy as a member of the US Delegation to the United Nations and as a program officer with The Century Foundation.

  • Caleb Melby is a senior investigative reporter with Bloomberg News, where he works with journalists across the newsroom to report urgent stories that have prompted action from prosecutors, regulators and lawmakers. His exclusive report on off-the-books perks offered by the Trump Organization triggered investigations, a guilty plea to felony charges by Trump’s chief financial officer, and the first and only criminal convictions of Trump’s business. His investigation with Polly Mosendz into Cerebral Inc. prompted a federal inquiry into its prescribing practices. Cerebral’s CEO was ousted and the company ceased prescribing most controlled medications. His series with Noah Buhayar and Kocieniewski showed how “well-connected individuals perverted the stated intention” of the federal Opportunity Zone program, and won a George Polk award. Stories with Kocieniewski on Kushner Cos. revealed deals that "stretched across the world and into the White House,” winning several awards, including the top honor from the New York Press Club. 

  • 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.

  • Brian M. Rosenthal is an investigative reporter at The New York Times, where he has worked since 2017. He has won numerous journalism awards, including the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting for exposing predatory lending in the New York City taxi industry. Prior to joining The Times, he worked as a reporter at The Seattle Times, where he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News for coverage of a deadly landslide, and at the Houston Chronicle, where he was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for revealing that Texas had secretly and illegally denied special education services to tens of thousands of children with disabilities. He also has won a national Emmy and the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting. He is currently the president of the Investigative Reporters and Editors, the largest professional journalism association in the United States, which provides training in investigative techniques to thousands of journalists around the world. He grew up in Indiana.

  • Bill Grueskin's career includes senior print and online editing roles, as well as six years as academic dean at Columbia Journalism School.

    He began his journalism career as a reporter and editor at the Daily American in Rome. He then served as a VISTA volunteer and founding editor of the weekly Dakota Sun on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota.

    He worked as a reporter and editor in Baltimore and Tampa before moving to The Miami Herald where he eventually became city editor. On his first day in that post, Hurricane Andrew hit Dade County, and the Herald’s coverage of the storm won the Pulitzer Gold Medal for public service.

    Grueskin joined The Wall Street Journal in 1995, editing Page One features and projects. In June 2001, he became managing editor of WSJ.com and oversaw the staff during and after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, next to WSJ’s offices. While at WSJ.com, the number of subscribers doubled to more than one million, and the site introduced blogs, interactive graphics and video.

    In 2007, he was named WSJ’s deputy managing editor, overseeing 14 domestic news bureaus, and combining print and online editing desks.

    He came to Columbia in 2008 as Academic Dean. At the Journalism School, he oversaw a dramatic transformation of the curriculum, designed to give students more flexibility to focus on skills ranging from video to data visualization to long-form digital journalism.

    In May 2011, Grueskin, along with Ava Seave and Lucas Graves, co-authored "The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism,” a report that examines online traffic and engagement patterns, emerging news platforms, paywalls, aggregation and new sources of revenue.

    In June 2014, he was named an executive editor at Bloomberg, overseeing efforts to train the global news staff to reach broader audiences across digital platforms.

    Grueskin has a B.A. in classics from Stanford University and an M.A. in international economics and U.S. foreign policy from Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies.

  • Betsy Morais is the managing editor of Columbia Journalism Review. Previously, she worked at The New Yorker, Harper’s and The Atlantic, and she has written for these and other magazines.

  • Ben Shapiro is a documentary maker working in radio, podcasts, and film and television. His radio projects have aired regularly on NPR, and on American Public Radio, the BBC and CBC. For 20 years he has been editor and producer at Radio Diaries, the award-winning first-person audio series heard on NPR’s All Things Considered. He has also been editor for programs and series at WNYC, Midroll/Earwolf, WUNC, with The Kitchen Sisters, and the Public Radio Exchange.

    Ben’s documentary films have appeared at SXSW, the Film Society at Lincoln Center, MOMA, and colleges, theaters and broadcasts internationally. His feature documentary “Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters” followed the renowned photographer for a decade, and was named a New York Times “Critics Pick”. As a cinematographer he has worked with PBS American Masters, National Geographic, and HBO.

    Ben has received the Peabody and DuPont awards for radio projects, and an Emmy for documentary cinematography.

  • Azmat Khan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter whose work grapples with the human costs of war. 

    She is an investigative reporter for both the New York Times and New York Times Magazine, a Carnegie Fellow, and the Birch Assistant Professor at Columbia Journalism School, where she also leads the Li Center for Global Journalism. 

    Her investigations for the New York Times, the PBS series FRONTLINE, and BuzzFeed's Investigations team have prompted widespread policy impact from Washington to Kabul and won more than a dozen awards. They include a Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting, a National Magazine Award for Public Interest Journalism; a National Magazine Award for Reporting; a Polk Award for Military Reporting; the Overseas Press Club’s Ed Cunningham Award for Magazine Reporting and the Roy Rowan Award for Investigative Reporting; the Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism; the John Seigenthaler Courage In Journalism Award; the Deadline Club Award for Independent Digital Reporting; the Deadline Club Award for Magazine Investigative Reporting; SAJA's Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding Reporting on South Asia; and other honors.

    Her multi-part series in the New York Times, "The Civilian Casualty Files," was awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting. The project was the culmination of more than five years of Khan’s reporting, including ground investigation as the sites of more than 100 civilian casualty incidents in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, more than 1,300 formerly secret military records she obtained in a legal battle with the Pentagon, and scores of interviews with military officials, pilots, strike cell teams, intelligence informants, local officials, airstrike survivors, and their families.

    Khan serves on the Board of Directors of the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, as First Vice-President of the Overseas Press Club’s Board of Governors, and is a co-founder of The Gumshoe Group. She is an International Security Program Fellow at New America, where she was previously a Future of War Fellow. She was also previously a fellow at the Macdowell Colony and a Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good.

    She received an MSt. from Oxford University, which she attended as a Clarendon Scholar, and a B.A. from the University of Michigan. She has also studied at the American University in Cairo, Egypt.

  • Ava Seave is a principal of Quantum Media, a New York City-based consulting firm focused on marketing and strategic planning for media, information and entertainment companies.

    Before founding Quantum Media with four others in 1998, Seave was a general manager at Scholastic Inc., The Village Voice and at TVSM. Seave has taught about the business of news and media at Columbia Journalism School since 2010, where she is an assistant adjunct professor; she currently co-teaches “Managing the 21st Century News Organization.” She also teaches at Columbia Business School where she is now an associate adjunct professor.  She currently teaches “Media & Entertainment: Strategy Consulting Projects.”  

    Seave is the co-author, with Jonathan Knee and Bruce Greenwald, of "Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong with the World’s Leading Media Companies."  She is co-author, with Bill Grueskin and Lucas Graves, of  "The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism."  She was a contributor to Forbes.com from 2013 to 2017.  She has written several cases for Columbia CaseWorks  including "French News Start-up L'Opinion:  Swimming Upstream in Uncertain Times,"  Contently: Evolution of a Media Start-Up,” “Native Advertising: Innovation or Trendy Trap,” and “Scripps Networks' Integration of Recipezaar.”

    Seave graduated from Brown University with an A.B. (Phi Beta Kappa) and Harvard Business School with a M.B.A. She is on two non-profit boards: DeLaSalle Academy, a middle school for academically gifted, financially challenged students and The American Poetry Review.

  • Ariel Ritchin is the Senior Producer for the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma, a project of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism encouraging innovative reporting on violence, conflict and tragedy worldwide. He directs and oversees all editorial content and leads strategic and digital initiatives, while managing specialized programs, workshops and trainings for reporters all over the world. Ariel is also a multimedia journalist and documentary filmmaker whose audio and video work has appeared on NBC, PBS and PRX, among others. He has previously worked in the multimedia department at the ACLU and as a video editor for Lucky Tiger Productions. He is a Logan Foundation Nonfiction Fellow, a Posse Foundation Scholar and a Humanity in Action Senior Fellow. Ariel's film work has been supported by DOC NYC, the Park Foundation, the Redford Center and the Rogovy Foundation. He holds an M.S. from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a B.A. from Middlebury College.

  • Ariana Gharib Lee is a producer for the Enterprise Storytelling Unit at NPR. Her work involves every facet of the editorial process, from writing and reporting to editing, finding guests, and fact-checking.

    Ariana works primarily with Embedded, NPR's home for documentary podcast series. From time to time, she also produces stories for Up First, NPR's critically acclaimed news podcast. She has also worked on award-winning stories for NPR's podcasts Invisibilia and Rough Translation.

    Ariana previously produced for Dustlight Productions, where she senior produced the ten-part Crooked Media series Mother Country Radicals. It won the 2024 Dupont-Columbia award as well as the 2022 Signal Award and the non-fiction podcast award at Tribeca. Before that, she produced the Webby award-winning second season of the podcast Tell Them, I Am. She also worked on Webby-winning Hello, Nature, an audio documentary about belonging and the United States' national parks.

    Ariana is an alumna of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.

  • Ari L. Goldman taught at Columbia as a professor of journalism for more than 30 years until his retirement in 2024. Although he spent most of his time in the classroom, he also spent a year as Dean of Students and another year as acting Academic Dean.

    When he first came to Columbia in 1993, Professor Goldman created the school’s Covering Religion seminar, which later gained the financial support of the Scripps Howard Fund. The fund enabled Professor Goldman to take students in the Covering Religion seminar on study-tours abroad during spring break. In the past, his class has visited India, Russia, Ukraine, Ireland, Italy, Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Territories. To learn more about his most recent trips, visit his class blog

    Although he retired from full-time teaching in 2024, Professor Goldman continues to direct the school’s Scripps Howard Program in Religion, Journalism and the Spiritual Life. He will teach Covering Religion as a Professor Emeritus in 2025.

    Ari Goldman was educated at Yeshiva University, Harvard and Columbia. Before returning to Columbia in 1993 to teach, he spent 20 years at The New York Times, most of it as a religion writer. Professor Goldman has been a Visiting Fulbright Professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem; a Skirball Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in England, and a scholar-in-residence at Yeshiva’s Stern College for Women.

    He is the author of four books including the best-selling memoir, The Search for God at Harvard. He has been honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Religion News Association and with an Alumni Award from Columbia Journalism.

    In addition to his teaching at the university level, Goldman is on the faculty of the School of The New York Times where his course, “Writing the Big City: Covering New York,” is one of the most popular offerings. It is open to high school students of all ages.

    He occasionally contributes articles, obituaries and reviews to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, The New York Jewish Week, the Forward, Tradition and the Jesuit magazine America.


    See Professor Goldman being interviewed on the CNN program “Amanpour” with his Covering Religion colleague Professor Gregory Khalil.

    See Professors Goldman and Khalil interviewed on CBS News.

    Here are recent articles by Professor Goldman from The New York Times.


    Web feature: A Day in the Life: Four Hours With Ari Goldman

  • Anthony DePalma spent 22 years as a reporter and foreign correspondent for The New York Times, serving as Bureau Chief in Mexico and Canada. At The Times he also was an international business correspondent covering the Americas, a national correspondent covering higher education, and a metro reporter covering housing, the working class, and the environment. He has focused his journalism on Latin America, especially Mexico and Cuba, but he has also traveled widely and reported from places as diverse as Albania, Montenegro, Guyana, and Suriname.

    His interest in Cuba is both professional and personal. He is married to Miriam Rodriguez, who was born in Cuba and came to the United States after the 1959 Revolution. He first visited Cuba in 1979 during the brief thaw in U.S.-Cuba relations during the administration of Jimmy Carter and has been back many times since then to report and to visit family.

    In 2001 he published "Here: A Biography of the New American Continent," which was re-released as an e-book in 2014. His second book, published in 2006, was "The Man Who Invented Fidel," about the rise of Fidel Castro and the impact that Castro, and journalism, have had on U.S.-Cuba relations. The book has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, and the film rights were purchased by Moxie Pictures. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attack, he wrote nearly 100 of the “Portraits of Grief” that won a Pulitzer for The Times in 2001.

    He left The Times in 2008 to become writer-in-residence at Seton Hall University, where he continued writing while teaching classes on international relations and journalism. While there, he completed his third book, "City of Dust," about the environmental and health crises that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The book was the basis of a CNN documentary “Terror in the Dust,” which won the Society of Professional Journalists’ award for best documentary in 2011.

    He has taught at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism since 2009.

    Among his many professional recognitions are a 2007 Emmy finalist for “Toxic Legacy,” a documentary co-production of The New York Times and the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. In 2009, Columbia University awarded him the Maria Moors Cabot Award for distinguished international reporting. He has been named a media fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and a visiting scholar at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

    He continues to write and lecture about Latin America and the environment, while also reporting on many other subjects. His latest book is "The Cubans: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times," published in 2020, by Viking, an imprint of Penguin/ Random House, in the U.S., and by Bodley Head in the U.K. It has been translated into Bulgarian, Chinese, Korean and Polish.   

  • Ann Cooper is an award-winning journalist and foreign correspondent with more than 25 years of radio and print reporting experience. She also worked eight years as executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a press freedom advocacy group, prior to joining the Columbia faculty.

    Cooper’s voice was well known to National Public Radio listeners as NPR’s first Moscow bureau chief, covering the tumultuous events of the final five years of Soviet communism. She co-edited a book, “Russia at the Barricades,” about a failed 1991 coup attempt, and she has continued to write about the glasnost era, the subsequent decline of press freedom in Russia, and Russia’s global media strategy.

    After Moscow, Cooper worked as NPR's bureau chief in Johannesburg. Her coverage of South Africa’s first all-race elections in 1994 helped NPR win a duPont-Columbia silver baton for excellence in broadcast journalism. 

    Cooper has also reported for the Louisville Courier-Journal, Capitol Hill News Service, Congressional Quarterly, the Baltimore Sun, and National Journal magazine. In 1996, she was the Edward R. Murrow fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and in 2003 she was the James H. Ottaway Sr. Visiting Professor of Journalism at State University of New York in New Paltz.

    Cooper served as president of the Correspondents Fund and is a member of CPJ’s Leadership Council and of the Council on Foreign Relations. At Columbia, she was the Journalism School’s Broadcast Director 2006-2012 and International Director 2015-2018. She served on Columbia's Committee on Global Thought and as a member of the Harriman Institute faculty at Columbia. Cooper has also been a juror for the Pulitzer, Overseas Press Club and duPont-Columbia awards, and she chaired the duPont jury 2007-2010.

    Iowa State University, where Cooper majored in journalism, has honored her with its James W. Schwartz award for service to journalism and its Alumni Merit Award, given "for outstanding contributions to human welfare that transcend purely professional accomplishments and bring honor to the university."

    She has been to nearly 80 countries – some as a journalist, others as a press-freedom advocate or a team leader for Habitat for Humanity global volunteer programs. She has been a U.S. State Department speaker on press freedom and journalism ethics in Turkey, Russia and Germany. 

    Cooper was a Spring 2020 fellow at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.

  • Andrew McCormick is an independent journalist in New York. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Politico, the South China Morning Post and more. He recently helped launch Covering Climate Now, a collaboration of hundreds of news outlets dedicated to improving coverage of the climate story. He was also a Delacorte Magazine Fellow at the Columbia Journalism Review.

    Andrew received an M.S. from Columbia Journalism School, where he was valedictorian of his class and won a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship. Prior to journalism, he was an officer in the U.S. Navy.

  • Andrea Fuller is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in New York City who specializes in data analysis. She uses spreadsheets, databases, and computer code to find stories. Ms. Fuller joined the Journal in April 2014. She previously was a data journalist at Gannett Digital, The Center for Public Integrity and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She is a graduate of Stanford University.

  • Andie Tucher, a historian and journalist who has taught at the journalism school since 1998, writes widely on the evolution of conventions of truth-telling in journalism, photography, personal narrative, and other nonfiction forms. She is the author of Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History (Columbia University Press 2022), which has won awards from the ICA, the AEJMC, the Columbia University Press, and Kappa Tau Alpha. Her previous book Happily Sometimes After: Discovering Stories From Twelve Generations of an American Family (UMass 2014) explores stories told by her ancestors as truthful to make sense of their world — stories about kidnaps, murders, changeling children, lost fortunes and how the great-grandmother of Chief Justice John Marshall married Blackbeard by mistake. Tucher is also the author of Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium (UNC 1994), which won the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians. 

    Before coming to Columbia, Tucher served as a speechwriter for Clinton/Gore ’92. She was an editorial associate to Bill Moyers at Public Affairs Television and edited his book World of Ideas II (1990). She also served as editorial producer of the historical documentary series "The Twentieth Century" at ABC News and an associate editor of Columbia Journalism Review.

    Her articles, many of which are available on Academia.edu and Columbia’s Academic Commons, have appeared in Photography and CultureAmerican Journalism, Book History, Journalism History, Journalism Practice, Columbia Journalism Review, Humanities, common-place.org, and other scholarly and popular publications.  

    Tucher graduated from Princeton as a Classics major, earned her M.S. in rare-book librarianship from Columbia’s bygone School of Library Service and holds a Ph.D. in American Civilization from New York University. She isn’t a bad photographer but wishes she were a better pianist.

  • Amy Singer is a writer and editor specializing in legal issues. She worked at The American Lawyer magazine for 20 years, covering topics that included the death penalty, product liability, white-collar crime, takeover battles, immigration and women in the law. Among several honors, Singer won a Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for Best Single Article for her editing of Recipe for Disaster, an investigative feature on the misconduct and miscalculations of lawyers defending Morgan Stanley in a lawsuit brought by billionaire Ronald Perelman. She wrote one of the lead articles in Can America Enforce Its Drug Laws, which won a National Magazine Award for Single Topic Issue. 

    While crime and justice issues have been a central focus of her career, enhanced by a one-year fellowship to attend Yale Law School, Singer has also covered a range of subjects outside the law. She has edited at BusinessWeek and Thomson Reuters, and she worked at The New York Times as a news assistant and wrote for several sections of the paper, including the Sunday Magazine. She has also written for The Nation, Marie Claire and other publications. She won a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism, Honorary Mention, for her Marie Claire magazine story, "Girls Sentenced to Abuse," in which she investigated claims of assault and sexual abuse of girls held in an Alabama juvenile detention. 

    Singer attended the University of California at Berkeley, graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and earned a Master of Studies in Law degree from Yale Law School.

  • Alyson Martin is the editor of Columbia News Service and a thesis adviser. Martin has also taught Reporting and Business of Media at the j-school.

    Martin has covered cannabis and the war on drugs for more than a decade. She is the co-author of A New Leaf: The End of Cannabis Prohibition (The New Press)and co-founder of Cannabis Wire, an independent newsroom that has received grants from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation and the NYC Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment. She writes a daily, paid newsletter.

  • Alisa Solomon directs the Arts & Culture concentration in the M.A. program, teaching its core seminar as well as an array of M.S. courses; among them, Ethics, Reporting, Criticism workshop. She began her journalism career in the early 1980s as a theater critic at the Village Voice and, while continuing in that role in her 21 years on staff at the Voice, also covered such areas as U.S. immigration policy, LGTB issues, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, electoral politics, and women’s sports. Nowadays, she contributes regularly to The Nation, covering live performance and scripted TV. As a freelancer, she has contributed to magazines, newspapers, and radio stations ranging from Glamour and Poz to the Guardian, New York Times and WNYC.

    Trained academically in theater history and dramatic literature, Alisa stays connected to the field, contributing to journals like The Drama Review and America Theater. Her books include Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender (winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism) and Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ (winner of the Kurt Weill Prize, the Jewish Journal Prize, and the Theatre Library Association’s George Freedley Memorial Award). Alisa also has an arts practice as a dramaturg. Most recently, she has been working with Anna Deavere Smith on her Pipeline to Prison Project.

    Alisa believes that to write about the arts is to write about the world: Covering the field involves not only aesthetic considerations, but also politics, law, social issues, economics, trade policy – you name it. A cultural journalist gets to do everything.

    Though born and raised in the Midwest, Alisa considers herself a thorough New Yorker. In good weather, you can find her commuting from downtown to campus on two wheels via the Hudson River bike path.

    Alisa received her B.A. at the University of Michigan’s Residential College, and her MFA and doctorate in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the Yale School of Drama.

  • Alexis Clark is an author and freelance journalist. She writes about history with a focus on race, culture and politics during World War II and the Civil Rights era. She’s a contributing writer for History.com with stories on African American culture, the military and milestones in social and racial justice. Clark’s also a correspondent for the public affairs television program, Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien, where she reports on historic and contemporary issues, such as poverty, food insecurity, the building trades industry and neglected neighborhoods.

    Clark has written a variety of features for The New York Times over the years, from the treatment of Black servicemembers in World War II to sibling separation in New York State’s foster care system. She contributed to “Beyond the World War II We Know,” a Times series documenting lesser-known stories from the war. Clark also helped launch “Past Tense,” a special digital series in 2018. The project brought narratives of the past to life in a series of articles that showcased photographs from the New York Times archive.

    Clark has received grants from the Ford Foundation for her World War II research projects, and her narrative non-fiction book, "Enemies in Love: A German POW, a Black Nurse and an Unlikely Romance," was published by The New Press in 2018. The book has since been covered by The New Yorker, The New York Times, PBS Newshour Weekend, NPR, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien, Essence, WNYC and Bloomberg TV. In addition, “Enemies in Love” is being developed into a television series.

    Clark started her journalism career in 2002 and is a former senior editor at Town & Country magazine where she covered cultural and philanthropic events across the country, including President Barack Obama’s inauguration. Her work has also been published by Smithsonian.com, Preservation Magazine, NBC News Digital and other publications. Clark is currently under contract with Penguin Random House for a nonfiction book on America’s Black sororities and their fight for gender and racial equality.

    Clark, a Dallas native, is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School. She also holds an M.A. in Government from the University of Virginia and a B.A. in Political Science from Spelman College. 

    Notable Work

  • Alexandra Zayas is a deputy managing editor at ProPublica, running a team of reporters and overseeing senior editors of its global public health and visual storytelling teams. Since joining ProPublica in 2017, stories she edited have won two National Magazine Awards, two George Polk Awards and a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. She worked at the Tampa Bay Times for 12 years, ultimately as the newspaper’s enterprise editor. As a reporter, her investigation into abuse at unlicensed religious children’s homes won the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting and the Livingston Award for Young Journalists and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.

    She also teaches investigative journalism at Poynter.

  • Professor Stille graduated with a B.A. from Yale University and earned an M.S. at Columbia. He has worked as a contributor to The New York Times, La Repubblica, The New Yorker magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Correspondent, U.S. News & World Report, The Boston Globe, and The Toronto Globe and Mail.

    He is the author of Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism (1991); Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic (1995); The Future of the Past (2002); and The Sack of Rome: How a Beautiful European Country with a Fabled History and a Storied Culture Was Taken Over by a Man Named Silvio Berlusconi (2006).

    Stille is the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for best work of history (1992), Premio Acqui (1992), San Francisco Chronicle Critics Choice Award (1995), and the Alicia Patterson Foundation award for journalism (1996).

  • Alex Clark is a video journalist and filmmaker covering the intersections of science, race, and media. His recent work includes co-producing the feature PBS NOVA film "Crypto Decoded” (2022) and editing for “The Picture Taker” (2022).

    Previously Alex produced and hosted Vox’s Emmy-nominated series “Glad You Asked” and the NOVA Education series "Misinformation Nation," which helps teens identify and combat misinformation. He was honored as one of DOC NYC’s 40 Under 40 class of 2022.

    Alex holds an M.S. from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he teaches Image & Sound video courses.

  • Alan Chin was born and raised in New York City’s Chinatown. Since 1996, he has worked as a freelance photojournalist reporting for the New York Times and other publications from China, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Central Asia, and Ukraine, as well as extensively in the United States. Alan is also Managing Director of Facing Change: Documenting America / Documenting DETROIT, a community-based photojournalism initiative, and a winner of the 2017 Knight Foundation Detroit Arts Challenge. Additionally, Alan is both writing and photographing a book on his ancestral region of Toishan in southern China, and a founding partner of Red Hook Editions, a small press specializing in photography books. His images are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Detroit Institute of Art.

  • Akisa Omulepu is an Emmy-nominated documentarian, director, producer, and editor. She directed and produced “A Dream Deferred: The Broken Promise of New York City Public Housing” for PBS, which was nominated for two Emmys. Akisa was the first Black woman to direct “Great Performances” on PBS in the show’s 50-year history. 

    A native New Yorker, Akisa lived in Nairobi, Kenya for eight years working as a foreign correspondent, producer, and entertainment manager. While in Kenya, she launched her production company, executive produced and hosted a weekly television show, and was a part of the NBC Nightly News production team that covered the Westgate Mall al-Shabab terrorist attack, among other things.

    Akisa serves as a judge for the Primetime Emmys, Daytime Emmys, the News & Documentary Emmys, and the NAACP Image Awards. She is a member of The Directors Guild of America (DGA), The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (Television Academy), a lifetime member of The National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. 

    Akisa started her career in academia teaching mathematics in a public school in the South Bronx, and at the City University of New York. She earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, a graduate degree in journalism from Columbia University, and is a Yale World Fellow.

  • Aida Alami is a Moroccan reporter usually based in Rabat, Morocco, and Paris, and now, in New York City. She mainly covers migration, human rights, religion, and race. She has reported from North Africa, the Middle East, Europe, the United States, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Senegal.

    She’s been a regular contributor to the New York Times since 2011 but writes for other places such as the New York Review of Books. She was a contributor to the best-selling book, “Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World,” and is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism. She is currently finishing a documentary feature on civil rights in France. She grew up in Marrakesh and is fluent in French and Arabic.

  • Adiel Kaplan is an investigative reporter and editor at NBC News, where she works on cross-platform investigative projects, often with a data focus. A print reporter by training, Kaplan writes articles for NBCNews.com and works with producers to bring those stories to visual audiences on Nightly News, the TODAY Show, NBC News NOW and MSNBC. At Columbia, she teaches investigative reporting for the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Reporting and the Data Journalism program.

  • Abigail Deutsch is a freelance writer and editor whose work appears in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times Magazine, Poetry, the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, n+1, Bookforum and other publications.

    She is a winner of the Center for Fiction’s Roger Shattuck Award for Criticism and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. She has also received the Editors Prize for Reviewing from Poetry magazine and was a finalist for the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. She graduated from the Journalism School in 2009.

  • Jeff DelViscio is currently Chief Multimedia Editor/Executive Producer at Scientific American. He is the former director of multimedia at STAT, where he oversaw all visual, audio and interactive journalism. Before that, he spent over eight years at the New York Times, where he worked on five different desks across the paper. He holds dual master's degrees from Columbia in journalism and in earth and environmental sciences. He has worked aboard oceanographic research vessels and tracked money and politics in science from Washington, D.C. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT in 2018. His work has won numerous awards, including two News and Documentary Emmy Awards.

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