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I’m an award-winning journalist with a total of two decades of experience working in radio, print, online journalism and photography. My radio work has been featured on NPR, Marketplace and Voice of America. I’ve produced two 30-minute radio documentaries and have won national and regional awards for my work. I’ve reported from the mountains of Mexico and the Moskva River, from Microsoft headquarters and from call centers in India. I traveled by canoe into the jungles of Nicaragua to report one story and climbed to a remote hilltop village in Nepal to report another. I speak six languages, two of them fluently. I’ve worked as a producer-editor for MSNBC.com and as a vice president in the corporate world — in India. Now I’m focusing my energy on two things: drinking water for Mexicans (I’m co-founder of Biluu) and photography. My photographs have been exhibited at the Museo Soumaya, the Museo de la Ciudad de Querétaro, and at the Ex-Hacienda San José in Oaxaca. They have also been included in group exhibitions in New York City, Mumbai, and Washington, DC.
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I got my Bachelor’s in Russian Studies from Emory University, which gave me the opportunity to spend half a year living in Moscow just after the fall of the Soviet Union.
After graduating, I taught English in a little mountain town in Japan through the JET Programme. It was the height of Japan’s economic rise, a fascinating time to observe life there.
All through college I worked in journalism, landing my first magazine cover story as a summer intern at Memphis Magazine. At a now-defunct Atlanta newspaper, I helped break a story about nuclear waste buried at a popular park at my university.
I spent time as a general-assignment reporter at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette before plucking up the nerve to try my hand at what I longed to do — report for NPR. I gave it a shot, and my very first story aired on Morning Edition, reaching an audience of more than 9 million listeners.
As a stringer for NPR covering a large swath of the southern U.S., I reported on racial discrimination in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the re-trials of James Earl Ray, and of course Elvis. For the business program Marketplace I attended space camp for corporate execs and reported on a woman who’d turned a jet fuselage into an upscale trailer home.
I left the South to work for KUOW Public Radio in Seattle as a general-assignment reporter. There I developed a year-long series on the lives of Seattle’s street kids that won several awards, and served on an award-winning spot-news team. I also got tear-gassed in the now infamous “Battle in Seattle” WTO riots. On the worst day of the rioting, my four-minute report led Morning Edition’s coverage on NPR. I loved KUOW, but at the height of the first dot-com boom, I was lured away by MSNBC.com, where I produced the home page and helped determine news coverage eight hours a day.
Eventually frustrated sitting behind a desk while others reported the news, I left MSNBC in 2002 and moved to Mexico, though I didn’t know more than a few words of Spanish. After gaining fluency, I began freelancing from Mexico. I was later named Latin America correspondent for World Vision Report. The show now airs on hundreds of radio stations, including many public radio stations. (It is, by the way, “editorially independent from any sponsoring organization.” It’s a show about poverty and social problems — not about World Vision.)
In 2006 I received an invitation I couldn’t pass up — to take a break from journalism and try my hand in the corporate world. I worked for a U.S. company, helping establish a joint-venture presence in India, with 48 Indian employees and five offices, in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad. It was a great experience, working with FORTUNE 500 clients and learning a lot not only about the business world, but also about Indian business in particular. Still, the call of journalism was strong. After completing my commitment with the company, I reentered the world of freelancing.
Along the way I studied photography at the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop with the incredibly talented Ami Vitale and at Mexico City’s Centro de la Imagen with veteran war and gang photographer Donna DeCesare.
These days, after having spent six and a half years living in India, I’m now living in beautiful Oaxaca, Mexico, and working at Biluu to bring clean, affordable drinking water to Mexicans in an environmentally friendly way. I’m also passionately involved in photography. My photographs have now been exhibited at the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City, the Museo de la Ciudad de Querétaro, as well as at Tibet House in New York City, the Joan Hisaoka Gallery in Washington, and the Cymroza Gallery in Mumbai.
JOURNALISM AWARDS
1st Place, Enterprise Reporting, Washington AP Broadcasters
1st Place, Spot News (as a team), Washington AP Broadcasters
1st Place, Investigative Reporting, SPJ Western Washington Pro Chapter (Judges’ comments: “Tremendous effort, great tape.”)
1st Place, Continuing Coverage (as a two-person team), SPJ Western Washington Pro Chapter
1st Place, Spot News (as a team), Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) Western Washington Pro Chapter
1st Place, Enterprise Reporting, Washington AP Broadcasters
1st Place, News Special (as a team), Washington AP Broadcasters
2nd Place, Soft Feature, (Division A, national), PRNDI
2nd Place, Feature News Reporting, SPJ Western Washington Pro Chapter
Honorable Mention, Continuing Coverage (as a team), SPJ Western Washington Pro Chapter
Honorable Mention, Business/Economic/Consumer, SPJ Western Washington Pro Chapter
Honorable Mention, Health/Science, SPJ Western Washington Pro Chapter