Gilbert was named an Alfred I. duPont Awards Fellow by the School in 2020 and has been an award-winning reporter and producer for WPLN News in Nashville, TN, since 2021. She won a scholarship from the Overseas Press Club in 2022 and spent six weeks in Beirut, where she reported on Lebanon’s financial crisis, its thriving art market and antiquities trafficking.
At WPLN, she reported on Nashville’s Kurdish community, the largest in the U.S. She also co-produced a four-part podcast centered on a Kurdish family that came to the city as refugees in the 1990s. The project included a month-long reporting trip to Iraqi Kurdistan.
Gilbert has been conducting research on Garibaldi’s life and legacy for the past several months. As part of her research, she has traveled to Brazil, Uruguay, Spain, France and Italy and conducted dozens of interviews with professors, politicians, activists, folk historians, sea captains, dancers, and more.
Prior to attending Columbia, she earned a B.A. at the School of International and Public Affairs at Princeton, where she was also a reporter for four years for the Daily Princetonian.
The Horwitz Fellowship honors the late Tony Horwitz (1958–2019), a 1983 graduate of the Master of Science Program and winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for his work at The Wall Street Journal. Horwitz authored more than half a dozen books, including the New York Times Best Sellers "Confederates in the Attic," "Blue Latitudes," "Baghdad Without a Map" and "A Voyage Long and Strange."
The fellowship, which awards up to $6,500 to cover travel, research and reporting, is open to Journalism School graduates from the last ten years and supports reporting projects that bridge divides and promote equality and understanding. Last year’s fellow, Muriel Alarcón, ’20 M.A. Science, has reported extensively as a freelance journalist for several publications about Chile’s deadliest fire in 2024 and its lasting impacts. Read more on her website.
Learn more about the Tony Horwitz Fellowship
