2021-2022

Clara Hendrickson

Clara Hendrickson does PolitiFact fact checking at the Detroit Free Press, where she holds public officials across the state to account on a range of issues. Prior to her time in Michigan, Hendrickson was a researcher at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and a freelance reporter for national and local outlets. At Brookings, she wrote on a range of public policy issues, including rising regional inequality, domestic and international efforts to regulate “Big Tech” and the financial challenges confronting local newsrooms. Her journalism has appeared in Boston Review, Democracy Journal, The Atlantic and Politico Magazine. She has also contributed feature articles for the non-profit outlet DCist, such as the impact on service workers of eliminating late-night public transportation routes and efforts to provide residents affordable exercise options in neighborhoods that don’t have a gym. Hendrickson holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Pennsylvania where she was an op-ed columnist for The Daily Pennsylvanian, frequently covering labor and income disparity issues on campus and in Philadelphia.

Katie Kanazawich

KT Kanazawich is a photojournalist for Flint Beat based in Flint, Mich. A documentary and portrait photographer from Binghamton, N.Y., she has been working as a freelancer collecting community stories and photographing landscapes. She is an active community member volunteering time at East Learning Center Alternative School, The Dept. of Public Art, Avenue DIY, and The Broome County Humane Society. Kanazawich has also led photography lectures at Broome Community College and Cornell Cooperative Extension. She has worked as a darkroom assistant for photographer and artist ‘Teknari’. Before graduating with a degree in photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2014, she interned with music photographer Shane McCauley, as well as at the Alexandre Gertsman Contemporary Fine Art Gallery in NYC. Kanazawich is drawn to making colorful, intimate images of under-represented communities and people.

Frank Vaisvilas

Frank Vaisvilas covers Native American issues in Wisconsin for the Green Bay Press-Gazette in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The state is home to 11 federally recognized Native American tribes. Yet there is little to no coverage of tribes in the state. Vaisvilas traces his own roots to the Yaqui, the indigenous people of Mexico. He has been writing feature stories for the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times and the Daily Southtown the last seven years as well as serving as a breaking news weekend reporter for the Daily Southtown and the Chicago Tribune. Prior to this, Vaisvilas helped transform a shopper into an award-winning community newspaper with hard-hitting enterprise reporting, a professional redesign and an introduction of several sections. His work on rapidly rising property taxes for residents on Chicago’s south side was nominated for best investigative reporting by the Chicago Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Adapting to newsroom layoffs of photographers, Vaisvilas expanded his photography skills with the use of professional cameras and his photographs have often been featured on the front pages of major newspapers.

Alex Schwartz

Alex Schwartz covers endangered species and water issues for the Herald and News in Klamath Falls, Ore., whose readership spans four large rural counties in southern Oregon and northern California. A writer, photographer and graphic designer reporting at the intersection of science and culture, he was previously a freelance data reporter with The New York Times, helping track every coronavirus case in the U.S. Alex has also interned at Popular Science, where he reported on daily scientific research and used science to help explain the news. He has a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, where he specialized in health, science and environmental reporting and was a managing editor of The Daily Northwestern. Alex is originally from Orlando, Florida.

Camille von Kaenel

Camille is an environment reporter who has covered growth and development in San Diego County’s backcountry for inewsource, the aftermath of the Camp fire in Northern California for the Chico Enterprise-Record, and climate policy and politics in Washington D.C. for E&E News. Born in Switzerland and raised in California, she has a bachelor’s in international relations from the University of Geneva and a master’s in journalism from Columbia University in New York.

Dee Dwyer

Dee Dwyer is a photojournalist at the DCist in Washington, D.C. where she focuses on minority communities. She holds a BFA in Filmmaking and Digital Production from The Art Institute of Washington and has studied at The Art Institute of Miami. After graduating in 2012, Dwyer traveled to Cuba, Jamaica, Brazil and several states documenting daily life. Dee’s work has been exhibited at Photoville, Photoschweiz, and at The DC Arts Center and The Congress Heights Arts and Culture Center. Her work has been published on the sites of BET, Allure, W magazine, The Daily Mail, MetroUK and others.

Andrew Tsubasa Field

Andy Tsubasa Field covers the Kansas Legislature for The Associated Press, concentrating on the fallout from the state’s revenue shortfall. Most recently, Field wrote about local government for The Bismarck Tribune in North Dakota’s capital city, where his coverage of the community’s response to a refugee resettlement proposal drew national attention. Prior to joining the Tribune, he had internships at The Tennessean, The Chronicle of Higher Education, St. Louis Public Radio, Oregon Public Broadcasting and the Eugene Weekly. A graduate of the University of Oregon, Field was born in Tokyo and grew up in Singapore, before moving to the Houston area when he was 17. He is a Chips Quinn Scholar and was awarded ProPublica’s Diversity Scholarship. In 2016, He was also awarded a Certificate of Merit for Personality Profile from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association.  

Megan Valley

Megan Valley covers education for the Belleville News-Democrat in Belleville, Ill. She covered K-12 and higher education for the Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa for a year and a half. A 2018 graduate of the University of Notre Dame, she double-majored in English and the Program of Liberal Studies, and worked for The Observer, the student paper, first as a news writer and eventually as assistant managing editor. She was an intern at Ave Maria Press, a Catholic publisher, in Notre Dame and wrote on music for Exclaim!, a monthly Canadian music magazine. The summer after graduating, Valley attended New York University’s Summer Publishing Institute. She grew up in Flushing, Michigan, a suburb of Flint.

DeAsia Sutgrey

DeAsia Sutgrey covers East St. Louis for the Belleville News-Democrat in Belleville, Ill. She has been an intern and fellow for The Nation, VICE and the Detroit Free Press and blogged on culture for Blavity, a media company created by and for black millennials. At The Nation, she was part of the magazine’s “Vision 2020 Project” reporting on how young people are approaching the 2020 presidential election. She’s due to graduate in 2020 from the University of Kansas’ William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications, with a B.S. in Journalism with a minor in African and African-American Studies. Additionally, Sutgrey was a reporter for The University Daily Kansan, the University of Kansas’ student newspaper, for four years.

Ricky Rodas

Ricky Rodas reports for The Oaklandside, where he focuses on immigrant-owned and operated businesses in Oakland, California. The beat covers economic and neighborhood change, barriers to entry, minimum wage struggles and much more. Rodas is a Los Angeles native who grew up in the San Gabriel Valley to Salvadorean parents, studied at California State University-L.A. and was the first investigative reporter for his campus newspaper, The University Times. During his time at the University of California-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, Rodas was awarded Radio Television and Digital News Association’s (RTDNA) Pete Wilson Scholarship and a Jonathan Rodgers Fellowship. He also worked as a research assistant for the Investigative Reporting Program (IRP) at Berkeley where he was part of investigations into L.A.’s s child welfare system and the national sex offender registry. Through years of listening, determination and speech therapy, he overcame a childhood stutter. A multimedia journalist, he concentrated in audio at Berkeley and has experience in radio hosting, producing audio reports, working as a studio engineer, writing breaking news and investigative reporting.