2020-2021

Yehyun Kim

Yehyun Kim is a photojournalist for The Connecticut Mirror capturing the full breadth of experience in the Constitution State. Kim has had internships with the Victoria Advocate, USA Today and Acadia National Park. She has a journalism degree from the University of Missouri/Columbia. Kim was born and raised in South Korea and studied photojournalism at the Danish School of Media and Journalism. She participated in the Eddie Adams Workshop and has a degree from Dongduk Women’s University in South Korea. She won the 74th College Photographer Of The Year Award of Excellence in General News.

Isabelle Taft

Isabelle Taft covers Vietnamese and African-American communities for the Sun-Herald in Biloxi, Mississippi. Before joining Report for America, Taft worked as a researcher on Washington Post journalists’ book projects on Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle and President Trump’s impeachment. Before that, she worked in Hanoi, Vietnam, as a copy editor at Viet Nam News and a freelance journalist, reporting for publications including Politico Magazine and the Christian Science Monitor. She has also reported for The Texas Tribune. Taft was born and raised in Atlanta and majored in history at Yale University, where she graduated magna cum laude and co-edited a magazine of narrative nonfiction, The New Journal. Her reporting on women and reentry from prison in New Haven won the National Council on Crime & Delinquency Youth Media award.

Bailey LeFever

Bailey LeFever reports for the Tampa Bay Times where she focuses on senior citizens who are often overlooked by the media. LeFever examines everything from health care to culture, government policy to family dynamics. Most recently, LeFever covered local government at the Miami Herald, where she wrote stories on the ways the coronavirus has challenged elders and minority groups in the city. Previously she interned at the Palm Beach Post, both on the breaking news and the community teams. Over the past few years, LeFever has traveled to Cuba to cover the illegal Hawksbill sea turtle trade, reported from a canoe on the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, and hung out with tennis star Coco Gauff at teen phenom’s family’s sports bar. She has also photographed NCAA baseball and softball playoffs for the University of Florida Athletic Association. LeFever studied journalism and history at the University of Florida. While in college, she wrote for the local NPR station, WUFT News and interned at the Gainesville Sun. She was also managing editor of her college newspaper, the Independent Florida Alligator. LeFever grew up in Ocala, Florida.

Donte Kirby

Donte Kirby covers winners and losers in the tech economy for Technical.ly, a Baltimore-based news source publishing stories about the impact of the technology economy on growing cities and focusing on the entrepreneurs and technologists that make up that ecosystem. Kirby has spent the last year and a half as an education volunteer with the Peace Corps in Rwanda, where he taught English to over 150 students. Before that, as a journalist, he wrote for hyperlocal publications like JumpPhilly, the Philadelphia Citizen and Generocity covering arts, social impact, and community development. He had an earlier stint with Technical.ly as a contributing reporter. He holds a BA from Temple University in Philadelphia. “Break dancing saved my life,” says Kirby, who got into breakdancing his freshman year of high school after his mother died. He became interested in journalism after he became a Wallis Annenberg scholar.

Ashley Wong

Ashley Wong reports for The Sacramento Bee, concentrating on the diverse Asian American communities that make up some 20 percent of the city’s residents. She has covered the Covid-19 outbreak in Michigan as a freelance reporter for Bridge Magazine, as well as statehouse politics in Washington, D.C. as an intern for the Center for Public Integrity. She has also covered local news, Silicon Valley and higher education in the San Francisco Bay Area through internships at East Bay Express and USA Today. In college, she was a news editor at The Daily Californian, the University of California-Berkeley’s independent newspaper, where she won a First Place Society of Professional Journalists Award for her story on a conservative nonprofit backed by powerful GOP donors in 2018. Born and raised in the Detroit suburbs, she is a 2019 graduate of the University of California-Berkeley.

Maria Mendez

María Méndez reports for Texas Public Radio from the border city of Laredo where she covers business issues from an area that is now the nation’s top trade hub. She knows Texas well. Mendez has reported on the state’s diverse communities and tumultuous politics through internships at the Austin American-Statesman, The Texas Tribune and The Dallas Morning News. She also participated in NPR’s Next Generation Radio program while studying at the University of Texas at Austin. At UT, she wrote for The Daily Texan and helped launch diversity initiatives, including two collaborative series on undocumented and first-generation college students. One of her stories for these series won an award from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. She has spent the last year reporting for The Dallas Morning News as a summer breaking news intern and then as a fellow in the paper’s capital bureau in Austin. She is a native of Guanajuato in Central Mexico.

Jaida Grey Eagle

Jaida Grey Eagle reports for Sahan Journal, a news site in Minnesota’s capital, St. Paul, which focuses on immigrant communities. In her work as a photojournalist for Sahan, Grey Eagle covers Hmong, Somali and Latino communities. She is Oglala Lakota, and was born in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Grey Eagle is a photographer, producer, beadwork artist and writer. Her photography has been published in numerous publications such as Native People’s Magazine, Indian Country Today, Briarpatch, Vogue and Tribal College Journal. She is a co-producer on the Sisters Rising Documentary, which is the story of six Native American women reclaiming personal and tribal sovereignty in the face of ongoing sexual violence against Indigenous women in the United States and has recently received an Honorable Mention at the Big Sky Doc Festival. She received formal training in photography at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and holds her Bachelors of Fine Arts with an emphasis in photography.

Dominic Anthony Walsh

Dominic Anthony Walsh reports for Texas Public Radio focusing on the Hill Country region. Walsh knows Texas well. Before his senior year, he reported for TPR, and continued as a stringer in the fall and an intern again in the spring. He covered local arts and culture in San Antonio, a mass casualty shooting, voting rights, and the coronavirus pandemic, plus broke the news of a billion-dollar federal lawsuit brought by a group of farmers against one of the largest logistics companies in the world. He contributed to the statewide Texas Standard and to the NPR national newscast. Dominic got his start in broadcasting and journalism at Trinity University, where he worked at KRTU 91.7 FM and the independent campus newspaper, the Trinitonian. He is from Schertz, a suburb of San Antonio. He is also a percussionist, and spent six years in the Youth Orchestras of San Antonio. He remains active in the local music community.

Brandon Lingle

Brandon Lingle, a recently retired Air Force officer, reports for the San Antonio Express-News, where he concentrates on political dysfunction in the city’s suburbs. As a military public affairs officer, he supported media around the world including multiple embeds in Iraq and Afghanistan. His work appears in various publications including The American Scholar, The New York Times (At War), Guernica, TIME and The Normal School. His writing has been nominated for a National Magazine Award and noted in The Best American Essays. He taught in the U.S. Air Force Academy’s Department of English and Fine Arts and is a contributing editor of War, Literature and the Arts. He’s won the Air Force Association’s Gill Robb Wilson Award for the humanities and the Air Force Academy’s Outstanding Educator of the Year. Lingle is also an Olmsted Grant Recipient.  A Lompoc, California native, Lingle earned a B.S. in history from the U.S. Air Force Academy, an M.A. in English from the University of Texas at San Antonio and an M.F.A. in nonfiction from Sierra Nevada College.

Julia Sclafani

Julia Sclafani reports for Searchlight New Mexico, an independent investigative news organization, where she focuses on health issues in the state including behavioral health. Most recently, Sclafani covered city government and public safety for her hometown paper, The Daily Pilot, in Orange County, California. While there, she produced award-winning reporting on the legacy of racism in Huntington Beach following the federal indictment of four members of a local white supremacist group. Before making her way home, Sclafani completed stints covering breaking news and wildfires for the Sacramento Bee and reporting on human rights topics across Latin America for publications in the U.S. and abroad. She was a field coordinator and videographer for St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church's SEED Academy in Migori, Kenya. Sclafani earned a B.A. in Human Rights and Latin American and Caribbean Studies from Columbia University and an M.A. in Journalism from the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, where she was an inaugural member of CUNY’s Spanish-language journalism program.