2019 Resilience Fellowship Fellows

October Fellows

Victoria Seabrook is a news and documentary producer specializing in environmental and investigative reporting. She was one of the pioneers of Sky’s ‘Ocean Rescue’ campaign, which has changed British government policy on marine protected areas and plastic recycling. She has won awards for environmental stories, been invited to deliver talks and present documentaries and judge an environmental award.

Before joining Sky News, Victoria co-founded and edited a criminal justice news site, and reported on climate change denial. Her experience spans local and national newspapers, independent production companies and national broadcasters. In 2017 she won a scholarship for an investigative journalism program in Canada.

Outside of work, she is often hiking or skiing in the mountains or at gigs and music festivals.

Emily Ludolph started her career shepherding ideas to the stage as part of the TED Institute, TED’s business program. She has reported for the New York Times’ archival storytelling project, where her work on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing was featured in a special Sunday section and an episode of The Daily podcast. Most recently, she covered creative careers and business as senior editor at 99U Magazine. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Narratively, 99U, Airmail, Quartz, Artsy, Design Observer, and Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine and has been featured on ‘best of the year’ and ‘editor picks’ lists. She is a graduate of Vassar College.

Daniel Gutman is an Argentinian free-lance journalist, specialized in a wide-range of social and environmental issues. He has been traveling for more than 10 years around his and neighboring countries, writing stories about the impact of deforestation and industrial agriculture on poor communities, the social movements’ opposition to massive mining and hydro-electric projects, local solutions for the lack of access to potable water or to energy in remote villages and conservation projects that contemplate economic benefits for local population, among many other topics. He works for Ecoamericas, a monthly report on Latin American environmental issues, Inter Press Service (IPS), an international news agency that understands information as an agent of change and Mongabay, a nonprofit environmental news platform. Daniel is a lawyer by training and has worked for more than ten years in Clarín, the most read newspaper in Argentina, and also worked as press officer for Amnesty International Argentina. He has published five investigative-journalism books.

Lisa De Bode is the deputy editor of the digital team at The World, public radio’s international news show based at WGBH, PRX, and co-produced with the BBC World Service. She is a former staff reporter at Al Jazeera America in New York City and a field producer at CNN in Brussels. Past fellowships include a 2018-2019 Knight Science Journalism fellowship at MIT and an African Great Lakes Reporting fellowship from the International Women’s Media Foundation.

Matt McClearn joined The Globe and Mail as a data journalist in 2015, and since then has covered a range of stories including climate change’s impacts on Canadian communities, government accounting shenanigans and the challenges Canada’s indigenous peoples face in securing safe drinking water. Prior to that he served as a magazine journalist covering business for many years. He was born and raised in Nova Scotia and has lived in Toronto for the last two decades.

Craig Miller is a freelance reporter and editor who has spent the last decade on the Earth science beat, covering climate impacts, science and policy. As a science editor at KQED Public Media in San Francisco, he launched and directed the station’s multi-platform Climate Watch initiative. The project won numerous awards, including an Innovator of the Year award from the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism, and a shared AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award.

Prior to his 11 years at KQED, Craig produced and narrated television documentaries. He’s also been a specialty reporter at major-market TV stations, CNN and MSNBC. Craig is a U.S. Army veteran and a graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology. He’s also a nationally certified search & rescue technician.

Kelley Lynch is a photographer, writer and graphic designer with more than two decades’ experience identifying, capturing and producing unique and emotionally engaging stories from the developing world for NGOs, development organizations and donor agencies worldwide.

She has lived and/or worked in 25 developing countries over the past two decades—including nine years living in Bangladesh and four years in Ethiopia.

Kelley has written, photographed, designed and published more than 20 books in addition to photos and stories focused on all aspects of international development.

Kelley’s photographs, stories and publications have been used to raise awareness, communicate with donors, advocate with policy-makers and mobilize millions in support of programs for vulnerable populations.

Her clients include UNICEF, USAID, the Global Partnership for Education, the British Council, The World Bank, Save the Children, CARE and World Vision.

Nadja Popovich is a graphics editor at The New York Times, where she uses data and visuals to explain climate change science, energy policy and the ground-level impacts of our warming world. Previously, she was an interactive reporter at The Guardian U.S., focusing on public health, science and politics. She has won numerous design and journalism awards for her work and contributed to two projects honored with Emmy Awards for new approaches to digital storytelling. Nadja holds a bachelor’s degree from McGill University and a master’s from New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Elizabeth (Beth) Weise covers climate change for USA TODAY with an emphasis on solutions. She is based in USA TODAY’s San Francisco bureau. Weise shifted to her new beat in January of 2019 after five years of covering tech in Silicon Valley and a decade covering science and agriculture before that. She has a strong interest in China and Asia and reported from Beijing for the 2008 Olympics and Japan after the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011. Weise was a John S. Knight fellow at Stanford University, where she studied biotechnology. She speaks Swedish, which is sadly rarely helpful in her day job. Her last name rhymes with “Geese.”

Michael Kodas is an award-winning photojournalist and reporter, and the author of the bestselling books Megafire: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame, and High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Newsweek, Outside.com, OnEarth.org, GEO, Der Spiegel, The Denver Post, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, and numerous other publications in the United States and abroad. He has appeared on the PBS NewsHour with Judy Woodruff, All Things Considered on National Public Radio, Dateline NBC, and many other radio and television programs. From 1987 until 2008 he was a staff photographer, picture editor and writer at The Hartford Courant, in Hartford, Connecticut, where he shared a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News in 1999.

Until recently Kodas was the Associate Director of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder,

For more than two decades Michael has taken his cameras and notebooks to the most difficult to reach environments on the planet. He has worked as a forest firefighter, circumnavigated Long Island Sound in a sea kayak, trekked through the rainforests of Brazil and Costa Rica, documented veterans mapping minefields in Vietnam, sailed aboard the Amistad, ridden fishing vessels into the Atlantic Ocean, and climbed to the summit of Ama Dablam, a 22,494-foot peak in Nepal. In 2004 and 2006 he climbed on Mount Everest to investigate crime in the Himalaya.

---

July Fellows

María Fernanda is the editor-in-chief of La Voz de Guanacaste, a local and alt-monthly newspaper located on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. Along with a group of talented journalists, she has developed in-depth investigations on issues related to water scarcity, gender violence, local government corruption, refugees and how big companies use tax havens to hide their profits from the government. For this last investigation, she was among more than 300 journalists who dug into the Panama and Paradise Papers databases. She’s 2018 Professional Fellow from Latin America with International Center for Journalists and a 2018 TEDx Women speaker in Costa Rica. She recently won the National Institute for Women prize for journalists.

She started her career in 2010 working for the biggest media group in Costa Rica. She also wrote for a women-focused magazine where she investigated deep gender-equality stories and for a financial newspaper.

Brandon Loomis is editor of the Adirondack Explorer, a nonprofit magazine and website covering the Adirondack Park. Before moving to Saranac Lake last year, he was senior environment reporter for the Arizona Republic. He previously reported for other newspapers in the West, including the Salt Lake Tribune, Anchorage Daily News and Jackson Hole Guide, and he worked for the AP in Chicago. Loomis grew up in Ketchikan, Alaska, and has a journalism degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Jen Pinkowski has more than 15 years of experience as a science journalist. She has reported from three dozen countries about the work scientists are doing to explore, explain, and enlarge our world. Her stories have appeared in major media, including the New York Times, National Geographic, Washington Post, Time, Undark, Atlas Obscura, Scientific American, Outside, Archaeology, and other publications. She built and ran the digital science desk at Mental Floss, where she commissioned hundreds of stories and wrote long-form features. She holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MS from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Long based in New York City, she’s soon relocating to Berlin.

Sean Gallagher is a British photographer and filmmaker who has been based in Asia for over a decade. His work focuses on highlighting environmental issues in the Asia-Pacific region. Graduating in zoology from university in the UK, his background in science has led to his work communicating important global ecological issues through visual storytelling.

He is a 7-time recipient of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting travel grant, his images are represented by the National Geographic Image Collection and he is a Fellow of the UK Royal Geographical Society and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute Science Journalism Program.

His work has been published internationally, appearing in The Guardian, CNN, Newsweek Magazine, TIME, The New York Times and National Geographic News. He was a co-editor and contributor to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Guidebook for Journalists on Reporting on Climate Change and Sustainable Development in Asia and the Pacific (2018).

Jennifer Adler, PhD, is a conservation photographer and National Geographic Explorer. Her work as a photojournalist is informed by her scientific background, and she uses her imagery to communicate science and conservation. She holds a degree in marine biology from Brown University and a PhD in interdisciplinary ecology from the University of Florida. She specializes in underwater photography and science communication. Her grant-funded and assignment work has taken her all over the world to document science and conservation, including two recent assignments for The Nature Conservancy in Mexico and the Dry Tortugas. An ongoing theme in her work is the connection between people and water in a changing climate, which began with her photography and research focused on Florida’s freshwater springs and aquifer. Jenny is a freelance photojournalist based in Florida, USA, and is represented by National Geographic Image Collection.

Cheryl Hogue grew up in the rural Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with math-smart parent who were good storytellers. She has reported on environmental policy developments in Washington, DC, and at United Nations negotiations after stints at community newspapers in Maryland.  Cheryl earned a B.S. in biology from William & Mary and an M.S. in environmental sciences and policy from Johns Hopkins. She is a consummate birder and wildflower botanizer.

Laura Paddison is an editor at HuffPost where she runs a series called This New World, which focuses on huge global challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss, and explores people, communities and organizations working to build better societies and economies. She has written on a range of topics including climate change, poverty, inequality and the affordable housing crisis.  Before HuffPost she edited a section at the Guardian covering the intersection of climate change and business.

Vanessa Barchfield is the Science and Environmental Producer at Arizona Public Media, the NPR and PBS member station in Tucson. Vanessa graduated from Barnard College of Columbia University in 2004. After college, she spent many years abroad: studying journalism in Mumbai, India; working as a reporter in Sao Paulo, Brazil; then moving to Vienna, Austria, where she lived for seven years. While in Vienna, she worked as an editor with the Economist Group, in communications with the United Nations and as a speech writer for the Japanese government. She studied radio storytelling and production at the Transom Story Workshop in Cape Cod, Massachusetts and has been working as a reporter and producer at Arizona Public Media since January 2014.

In her current role, Vanessa works on AZPM’s flagship mini-documentary television show Arizona Illustrated.

Soyini Grey is a multi-media journalist and communications specialist from Trinidad & Tobago. She was most recently the lead anchor at teleSUR English and host of the flagship news programme From the South. She got her journalism start at the state media house CNMG, now TTT, where she worked as a radio news producer, news content producer for the newsroom’s online channels before transitioning into a broadcast journalist and producer. She has written for print and even scripted a documentary for Parliament Channel for the 100th anniversary of the construction of The Red House.
She has a great passion for the Caribbean, and is interested in projects that seek to improve intraregional connectivity. As a journalist she has covered Caribbean news, and seeks to include Caribbean voices in international discussions.

Ms. Grey has a BSc in Psychology with a minor in Sociology from The University of the West Indies. She also holds an M.A. in Public Relations from Westminster University.

---

February Fellows

Jie Jenny Zou
Jie Jenny Zou has been an investigative reporter with the Center’s award-winning environment and workers’ rights team since 2015. Her work includes deep dives on the influence of the fossil-fuel industry, as well as scientific integrity and conflicts of interest. Before joining the Center, she was a data-based reporter in New York investigating prisons and jails as well as judicial misconduct. Zou is an alumna of Stony Brook University and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Jack Lo
Jack Lo is a Peruvian journalist focused on Latin America’s natural territories and wildlife, indigenous communities’ rights and socio-environmental conflicts. He was awarded the Rey de España Journalism Award (2012) and the Peruvian National Journalism Award (2014). His texts were also nominated for Gabriel García Márquez Foundation Award and the Institute of Press and Society of Peru Award. He has been published by international platforms, including Mongabay Latam, EFE and The Wire. Jack Lo is a 2018 Professional Fellow from Latin America with ICFJ.

As an entrepreneurial, he co-founded the successful initiative Conservamos por Naturaleza, seeking the promotion of volunteer conservation in Peru. Through strategic alliances with traditional media, the platform reached more than 3 million people in Peru and abroad, achieving a real impact in Peru’s public policy.

For more than a decade, he has traveled extensively through the Andes and the Amazon rainforest of his native Peru, writing about the realities of communities with no voice. As a next step, he is creating a regional platform that aims to connect people with nature, a space of public dialogue where social actors can find solutions, get informed, and have an influence in the politics of their countries.

Rebecca Leber
Rebecca Leber is an environmental reporter in Mother Jones’ Washington, DC bureau. She has written on a range of climate and environmental issues for magazines and the web, reporting on money in politics, renewable power, the Paris agreement, climate science, and other topics. Lately, she has focused on investigating the changes taking place inside government agencies, and wrote a 2018 Mother Jones cover story about the EPA. Previously she was an editor for Grist and a staff writer for The New Republic. Last summer, she was invited to Vermont Law School as a media fellow, where she studied environmental justice.

Daniella Cheslow
Daniella Cheslow is an international reporter covering climate, conflict and cuisine. She has reported on hurricane recovery in Puerto Rico, drought in Cape Town, climate talks in Germany and a West Bank water shortage. When she’s not on the road, she works as a reporter and editor at NPR in Washington, D.C. Previously she reported for AP in Jerusalem and for Deutsche Welle in Bonn. Follow her @dacheslow

Peter Essick
Peter Essick is a working photographer, author, drone pilot, teacher and speaker.  He is a specialist in environmental themes documenting human impacts of development on the natural landscape. He has photographed stories on climate change, freshwater, high-tech trash, nuclear waste, drought and restoration in the San Francisco Estuary and the Great Lakes. He is also an avid outdoorsman has photographed several wilderness areas around the world. He was named one of the 40 most influential nature photographers in the world by Outdoor Photographer Magazine.

Essick has a bachelor’s degree in business from the University of Southern California and a M.F.A. from the University of Missouri. He is the author of two books featuring his photography, Our Beautiful Fragile World(Rocky Nook) and The Ansel Adams Wilderness(National Geographic Books). He is represented by Lumiere gallery in Atlanta, Georgia and by Aurora Photos. He lives in Stone Mountain, Georgia with his wife, Jackie.

Lori Freshwater
Lori Freshwater is a writer and investigative journalist working mainly in the areas of environmental justice and Department of Defense contamination at installations around the world. She is a graduate of the Newmark School of Journalism health and science program and her work can be seen in places including Earth Island Journal and Pacific Standard. She is working on her first book about the water contamination at Camp Lejeune Marine Corps base.

Leo Lagos
Leo Lagos is Science Editor in the Uruguayan newspaper La Diaria. He’s committed to science communication and has written and directed several TV shows as Superhéroes de la Física -where physics and biology were needed to explain superhero’s powers-, Paleodetectives -about paleontology and evolution- and the web series Mañana es Tarde about endangered species. Follow him at ciencia.ladiaria.com.uy

Janus Victoria
Janus Victoria is a director and co-writer of I-Witness, the longest running documentary program in Philippine television. She has covered remote areas and natural disaster aftermaths in her country: from typhoons to earthquakes; from floods to landslides; from rescue to retrieval operations. To see her work, go to the YouTube channel of GMA Public Affairs and select I-Witness.

Glenn Nelson
Glenn Nelson is the founder of The Trail Posse (trailposse.com), a non-profit media project about the intersection of race and the outdoors. He also is a founding member of the Next 100 Coalition, a national alliance of civil rights and environmental and community groups of color advocating for more inclusive management of public lands. He has won several national awards for his writing, photography and web publishing, including Outstanding Beat Reporting (Race, Inclusion and Environmental Justice) from the Society of Environmental Journalists. Glenn graduated from Seattle University and Columbia University, and was a sportswriter and columnist at The Seattle Times, the founder of HoopGurlz (now at ESPN), and a co-founder of Scout Media (now at CBS). He has two daughters, Sassia and Mika, and lives in Seattle with his wife, Florangela Davila, the managing editor of Crosscut.com, and their bichon poodle, Santana Banana. Follow him @trailposse.

Erica Gies
Erica Gies is an independent journalist based in Victoria, British Columbia, and San Francisco. She often reports internationally, with datelines from Iraq, Syria, Guyana, India, China, and other countries. Her work appears in Scientific American, Nature, the New York Times, The Economist, the Guardian, and more. She covers the core requirements for life, water and energy, as well as climate change, waste, and critters. She is writing a book about nature-based water management.
Twitter: @egies / www.ericagies.com

Maanvi Singh
Maanvi Singh is a freelance journalist currently based in San Francisco, CA. She reports on environmental issues, global development, health and food. Last year, she carried out a National Geographic Explorers grant in Kerala, India — where she investigated the impact of plastic and pollution. Previously, she worked as a reporter and editor at National Public Radio. During her time there she covered a range of topics, including the psychology of racism and the physics of baking the perfect pumpkin pie.

Anna Smith
Anna V. Smith is an assistant editor covering tribal affairs for High Country News magazine. Now based in Oregon, Anna began her journalism career at a rural newspaper in Washington state. In 2016, she joined the HCN team in Colorado, where she has covered the Yurok Tribe’s efforts to restore the Klamath River, investigated the Bureau of Indian Affair’s harassment problem,  and written about the proliferation of anti-Indian groups in disputes over land and water in the West. In 2018 she received Best Coverage of Native America from the Native American Journalism Association.

Gulnaz Khan
Gulnaz Khan is an editor at National Geographic covering travel, culture, and religion. Prior to joining National Geographic, Khan was part of a team documenting violence against girls and women with disabilities for Human Rights Watch, oversaw several studies on the neuroscience of social understanding funded by the National Institutes of Health, and conducted behavioral psychiatry research for the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. She holds a Master of Health Science with a focus on global health and human rights from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a Master of Journalism from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

Zoë Meyers

Zoë Meyers is a photo and video journalist living in Palm Springs, Calif. She grew up in New York and has lived in California since 2006.

After studying history in college, Zoë continued to pursue her interest in the use of first person narratives to document history and important current events. She believes that through the use of personal narratives stories and important issues can be better communicated, understood and connected to.

Zoë has worked and interned for a number of different organizations and publications including StoryCorps, The Center for Digital Storytelling, High Country News, and The Desert Sun. In 2015, Zoë produced a video series for High Country News, which explores how different communities in California are affected by water scarcity and water quality issues. Her multimedia project,Leaving the Dust, which documents stories of climate migration in California’s Central Valley, was a recipient of the California Humanities Documentary Project Research and Development grant.

Zoë currently works as a photo and video journalist at The Desert Sun , where she is passionate about reporting on environmental justice issues. She has worked on stories covering the unfolding crisis at the Salton Sea and pollution at the U.S. and Mexico border.