2020-2021

Roman Battaglia

Roman Battaglia reports for Delaware Public Radio where he focuses on politics, elections and legislation activity at the local, county and state levels. He was recently a part of the Next Generation Radio Program from NPR, where he reported on immigrant experiences in Sacramento, California. After graduating from Oregon State University in June 2019, he worked at Jefferson Public Radio as part of the Charles Snowden Program for Excellence in Journalism. His story covering the role that amateur radio operators play in disaster relief won the Bill Leonard Professional Media Award for Audio Reporting. During his time at Oregon State, Battaglia was the station manager for his college radio station, KBVR FM. Under his leadership, the station was named one of the top college radio stations by the College Media Association and a new podcast covering the experiences of Asian Americans on campus won the best podcast award for 2018-2019. Battaglia grew up in Portland, Ore.

Antonia Ayres-Brown

Antonia Ayres-Brown reports on race and poverty in Newport, Rhode Island for The Public’s Radio, which is based in Providence. She most recently covered state politics and government as an intern in the Chicago Tribune’s Springfield bureau. She also interned with the Toledo Blade and reported on manicurist licensing policy for Connecticut Public Radio. She earned her B.A. from Yale University, where she contributed to The New Journal, a long-form magazine about New Haven. In 2019, she was awarded Yale University’s Gordon Summer Journalism Fellowship to research gender-mixed barracks in the Norwegian Armed Forces. She has written about public policy, sexual violence and criminal justice.

Cedar Attanasio

Cedar Attanasio covers the New Mexico Legislature for The Associated Press where he concentrates on education and poverty. “I was born in a teepee and grew up off the grid,” he says. Among the pine—and, yes, cedar—forests of Northern New Mexico, Attanasio didn't have a television. "The first news story I ever saw was in a copy of Newsweek. I was kind of news starved, scrounging through old stacks of National Geographic," he says, adding “I have organized three community circuses. The first was in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I taught teens my age how to stilt walk.” A New Mexico native, Attanasio covered immigration for The AP from its bureau in El Paso, Texas and also covered the mass terrorist shooting in the border city. He’s a graduate of the Santa Fe Tutorial School, the Li Po Chun United World College of Hong Kong and Middlebury College, where he earned a bachelor's degree in geography and Spanish.

Nada Samir Atieh

Nada Atieh is a reporter for the Redding Searchlight in Redding, California, which covers areas north of Sacramento. She focuses on education, childhood trauma and the achievement gap. An Arab-American journalist from Dallas, Texas, Atieh has been working as a journalist in the Middle East since 2017. She has reported on the military escalation in northwest Syria and the humanitarian crisis created by the Syrian civil war within Syria. Previously, she trained with Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), where she coordinated the awards distribution at the 2018 annual conference. She has reported about the economic climate in Jordan for Venture magazine. Atieh has also covered the Jordanian government’s initiative to bring employment services to refugee camps, the impact of tax hikes on food producers in Jordan, and the growth of air connectivity throughout the Middle East. She is fluent in conversational Arabic and proficient in Modern Standard Arabic. She holds a B.A. from the University of Texas at Arlington, where she studied broadcast journalism and communications.

Milton Arline

Milton “Trey” Arline reports for The Daily Herald in Arlington, Illinois, where he focuses on central Lake County and its underserved, underreported minority community. Arline is a graduate of the Greenspun College of Urban Affairs at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). He has been consistently writing stories for his school’s newspaper, The Scarlet and Gray Free Press, since he went to UNLV in late 2018, with stories ranging from politics to health, jobs to entertainment. His work can also be found in The Nevada Independent, where he was an intern, and has worked on behalf of PBS, The Associated Press, and NBC on a short-term basis. Born in southern Georgia, Arline grew up a military brat and has lived in Germany, Portugal and Turkey.

Kassidy Arena

Kassidy Arena covers the Iowa statehouse for Iowa Public Radio, focusing on undercovered issues of interest to the booming Latino population. She helped cover global human rights violations and conditions during her internship at RUIDO Photo in Barcelona, Spain. She was a host, producer, and reporter for KBIA, the NPR member station in Columbia, Missouri. During the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kassidy continued to report remotely for Missouri News Network about state issues and politics. Kassidy graduated from the University of Missouri/Columbia with a degree in convergence radio reporting and producing in May 2020. She is originally from Berkeley, California but grew up in Omaha, Nebraska.

Hibah Ansari

Hibah Ansari reports for Sahan Journal, a news organization based in Minnesota’s capital, St. Paul, that focuses on the state’s immigrants. At Sahan Journal, Ansari covers immigration policy, especially affecting Hmong, Somali, and Latino communities. Born and raised in Wisconsin, she holds a master of science degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she was a Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism student. She is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Previously, she was a reporting intern for USA Today Network in Wisconsin and Fox Cities Magazine in northeast Wisconsin. She has also contributed to the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism.

Bryan Anderson

Bryan Anderson covers the North Carolina statehouse for The Associated Press where he focuses on health care, education, and politics. Most recently, Anderson was a political reporter for The Sacramento Bee where he created and hosted the “California Nation” podcast and received an award for his investigation of numerous breakdowns of California’s Department of Motor Vehicles automatic voter registration program. He was an investigative reporting fellow for News21 where he unearthed information on how little polluters have spent to clean up the nation’s superfund sites. Anderson has won a slew of awards including being a Regional Finalist for a Society of Professional Journalist General News Reporting honor. He was an enterprise manager for the student paper at Elon University and wrote stories for North Carolina publications including The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer.

Farnoush Amiri

Farnoush Amiri covers the Ohio statehouse for The Associated Press, where she concentrates on issues related to abortion, gun control and opioids. She’s worked at The AP in New York City, helping with the wire’s global response to the coronavirus pandemic. Before joining The AP, she worked as a digital reporter at NBC News, where her reporting on Hurricane Maria took her to Puerto Rico to cover the problems with federal aid in San Juan. Farnoush graduated with her master’s degree from New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute in early 2019. Born in Iran, Farnoush grew up in southern California and began her journalism career as a stringer for The Orange County Register. She serves on the board of the South Asian Journalists Association.  

Graham Ambrose

Graham Ambrose is a reporter for the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting. Based in Louisville, Ambrose focuses on the underreported problems with youth services throughout the Bluegrass State. Ambrose covered the Iowa presidential caucuses for the Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa. Previously he covered the fallout from the worst-ever flood of the Mississippi River and the hollowing out of the rural and industrial Midwest for the Dispatch-Argus, a newspaper in East Moline, Ill. He was an intern at The Boston Globe and The Denver Post. Graham has worked as a speechwriter, a public records redactor and a physics tutor, but his favorite job was youth baseball umpire. He holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University, where he graduated summa cum laude.