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Nick Janzen is a former award-winning energy and environment reporter. He’s covered toxic waste cleanup, the coal and renewable energy industries, agriculture, and coastal wetland loss for public radio stations in Indiana and Louisiana. New Orleans born and raised, Nick studied political science and liberal arts at the University of Alabama and is currently a law student at the University of Maine.
Producers for "Firing Forests to Save Them" - Allison Herrera and Debra Utacia Krol
Allison Herrera is an acclaimed Native American radio journalist who currently works with PRI’s “The World.” Herrera’s Native ties are from her Xolon Salinan tribal heritage; her family’s traditional village was in the Toro Creek area of the Central California coast. She’s covered gender and equity for PRI’s reporting project “Across Women’s Lives,” which focuses on women’s rights around the world. This project has taken her to Ukraine, where Herrera showcased the country’s global surrogacy industry, and reported on families who are so desperate to escape the ongoing civil war that they have moved to abandoned towns near the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site.
Herrera’s Localore project “Invisible Nations” received several awards from the Associated Press and the Society of Professional Journalists.
Herrera previously covered Oklahoma’s diverse Indigenous population, and received an Emmy award nomination for her Reveal story “Does the Time Fit the Crime,” which centered on criminal justice in Oklahoma and Ohio.
Her current project: a short documentary about the work of Jim Denomie, an Ojibwe painter from La Courte d'Oreilles, Wisconsin.
Herrera is based in Minneapolis, where she lives with her daughter, Anna.
Indigenous storyteller Debra Utacia Krol is an award-winning journalist with an emphasis on Native issues, environmental and science issues, and travel who's fond of averring that "My beat is Indians." She is an enrolled member of the Xolon (also known as Jolon) Salinan Tribe from the Central California coastal ranges.
Krol's forceful and deeply reported stories about peoples, places and issues have won nearly a dozen awards.
Krol seeks to leverage her extensive journalism experience in Native America and in the mainstream to tell the real story of Indian Country.
With nearly 20 years’ professional experience, Krol has covered topics ranging from how the Tohono O’odham Nation addressed border incursions and Arizona tribal communities’ efforts to deal with Alzheimer’s disease, to how a diverse group of artists, gallery owners and activists worked to create a live/work arts overlay district in downtown Phoenix. Krol's Arizona Indian tourism guides have been distributed across the U.S., and her coverage of the impact of invasive species on Native communities has won her accolades.
Krol has written for Indian Country Media Network/Indian Country Today, High Country News, Huffington Post, The Revelator, VICE News, Winds of Change Magazine (the journal of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society), the Official Arizona Visitors’ Guide and many other publications.
Producer for "The Forgotten Civilians of Eglin Air Force Base" - Jon Kalish
For the past 30 years, Claire Schoen has been producing audio stories in radio, audio tours and podcasts. This work includes over 30 long-form audio documentaries on stories ranging from immigration to solitary confinement to climate change.
Ruxandra Guidi has been telling nonfiction stories for almost two decades. Her reporting for public radio, magazines, and various multimedia and multidisciplinary outlets has taken her throughout the United States, the Caribbean, South and Central America, as well as Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico border region.
Throughout her career, Guidi has collaborated extensively and across different media to produce in-depth magazine features, essays, and radio documentaries for the BBC World Service, BBC Mundo, The World, National Public Radio, Marketplace, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Orion Magazine, The Walrus Magazine, Guernica Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, National Geographic NewsWatch, The New York Times, The Guardian, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Atlantic, among others. She’s a native of Caracas, Venezuela.
Emrys and Greg Eller produced, reported and mixed "The Klamath Water Wars"
Emrys Eller (left) is a documentary filmmaker in New York. He and his brother Greg grew up in the Alaskan bush. Together they occasionally produce audio documentaries on the environment and the people who live in the western United States. They reported the "The Klamath Water Wars" in the summer of 2016 and finished production in 2018..
Joseph O’Connell, coproducer of "New Growth in the Home of Environmental Justice" is a musician and public scholar who lives in Durham, North Carolina. He conducts documentary fieldwork and produces narrative audio for cultural programs across the U.S. He is a member of the production team for American Songster Radio, a North Carolina Public Radio WUNC podcast starring Grammy-winning musician and historian Dom Flemons.
As a recording artist, O’Connell has collaborated with the Criminal podcast, songwriter Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and Songs: Molina, a project memorializing the late Jason Molina. He has recorded under the band name Elephant Micah for almost two decades. In 2018, the music publication Pitchfork celebrated Elephant Micah’s ambient-leaning Genericana for its “oceanic depth and weight."
Ese Olumhense is an investigative reporter and adjunct assistant professor at Columbia Journalism School. She has worked at THE CITY, the Chicago Tribune and the Investigative Fund; as a freelancer producer she has worked on programs for MTV and Netflix. She is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School, and was a fellow of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism there.
Laura Isensee is an experienced storyteller, journalist and audio craftmaker based in Houston, Texas.
For over eight years, Laura worked as a reporter and editor at Houston’s NPR station. Her stories have appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition, Here & Now and Marketplace. She has also produced podcasts for Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and Lantigua Williams & Co. She previously worked in newspapers, primarily at The Miami Herald.
Both her audio and print work have won local and regional journalism awards. Laura is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and earned her master’s in journalism at Columbia University.
Yvette Benavides is a professor of English and creative writing at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. She is the host of the Texas Public Radio Book Public podcast. She is the co-author, with David Martin Davies, of San Antonio 365: On This Day in History (Trinity University Press).
David Martin Davies is a veteran journalist with more than 30 years of experience covering Texas, the border and Mexico. He is the host of Texas Public Radio’s daily news program The Source and the syndicated weekly news magazine Texas Matters. Davies’ journalism has been recognized with two national Edward R. Murrow awards.
Jonathan Miller is a freelance radio and print journalist and executive director of Homelands Productions, a nonprofit journalism collective specializing in radio features and documentaries. He has worked in more than 20 countries in Asia, the Americas, Africa, Europe, and the Pacific. His features, news reports, and commentaries have been broadcast on NPR, Marketplace, PRI’s The World, BBC, CBC, PBS NewsHour, and other radio and television outlets. He has also written for The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler, Parents, Christian Science Monitor, and many other publications. From 2019 to 2020 he was senior producer of the Wondery podcast “The Next Big Idea” and from 2106 to 2018 he served as associate director of Cornell University’s Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. He has won several awards for his writing and radio projects.
Rodriguez Mendez, Torres and Gonzalez-AndradeOLIVIA RODRIGUEZ MENDEZ
Olivia Rodriguez Mendez (she/her/ella) is from Thermal, California, an unincorporated community in the Eastern Coachella Valley (ECV). Olivia is passionate about working alongside other community members in local efforts that center community voices.
Olivia graduated from UC Berkeley with a major in Integrative Biology. Upon graduation Olivia returned to the ECV where she joined Coachella Unincorporated as a youth journalist in 2015. Throughout her time in Coachella Unincorporated, Olivia had the opportunity to work alongside other local filmmakers and artists to co-produce and write an award-winning film called, Estamos Aqui: A Community Documentary. Olivia then pursued a Masters in Public Health with an emphasis in Global Health from Loma Linda University.
Currently, Olivia is the Senior Program Coordinator for ¡Que Madre! Media, a program of Youth Leadership Institute. ¡Que Madre! is a space for young womxn in the ECV where they destigmatize mental health issues in their community through storytelling and advocacy.
ADRIANA TORRES
Adriana Torres is a freshman at Stanford. "I am from the eastern Coachella Valley, specifically the unincorporated community of North Shore. At the moment I am planning to study public policy with a concentration in discrimination, crime, and poverty policy. In the future I hope to be able to come back into my community and do work related to immigration laws and policies."
ROSA GONZALEZ-ANDRADE
Rosa Gonzalez-Andrade (she, they) is from the unincorporated community of Thermal, located in the Eastern Coachella Valley (ECV). She is currently a freshmxn at the University of California, Irvine as a Biological Science major on the pre-med track. She hopes to become a general physician or a gynecologist to help the community that helped her grow, the ECV. She enjoys promoting environmental, public, and mental health, as well as education reforms, through her writing.
Shalina Chatlani is the health care reporter for the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between NPR, WWNO in New Orleans, WBHM in Birmingham, Alabama and MPB-Mississippi Public Broadcasting in Jackson.Shalina is based out of WWNO in New Orleans and covers health care access and inequity. Before that she was a science reporter for KPBS in San Diego and the Emerging Voices Fellow at WPLN in Nashville. Some of her reporting has looked at racial disparities in the coronavirus vaccine rollout and how the financial stress of the coronavirus pandemic is affecting communities of color in San Diego.
