Meet The 2025 Fellows
Joseph Amodio
Joseph V. Amodio is a veteran journalist, television writer and live audio describer. He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Focal Point, an award-winning online cybersecurity news magazine. His work covering the changemakers in entertainment, fashion and health has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Men’s Health, Newsday, Los Angeles Times, CNN.com and Barrons.com, and has been syndicated in publications around the world. His true-crime docudramas have aired on Netflix, Discovery, A&E and other outlets. An ardent supporter of accessibility for all audiences, he also writes audio description scripts for film and TV series—that’s the voice on your TV that describes what’s happening for blind and low-vision audiences and that, yes, many other folks turn on by accident—and performs live audio description for television broadcasts, including the 95th Academy Awards (ABC), the Coronation of King Charles III (CBS News) and the current 50th season of Saturday Night Live (NBC).
Lucy Fulford
Lucy Fulford is a journalist and filmmaker whose work centres around migration and belonging, conflict and climate. Her stories have appeared in The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, BBC, CNN and RAI, and she has produced films and written for non-profits in London including Save the Children, Comic Relief and Global Witness. Growing up between cultures has led to her interest in exploring belonging and hidden histories. Lucy graduated with a History degree from Bristol University and is the author of “The Exiled: Empire, Immigration and the Ugandan Asian Exodus”, a narrative non-fiction book which weaves together memoir, history and testimony to reveal an overlooked period of post-colonial history, when Idi Amin expelled South Asians from Uganda, and its ongoing impact today. This work received support from the Penguin WriteNow and HarperCollins Author Academy programs and was longlisted for an HWA Non-fiction Crown award. She is working on a novel exploring interwoven stories of migration.
Farida Jhabvala Romero
Farida Jhabvala Romero is an award-winning journalist at KQED Public Radio in San Francisco, where she has covered labor, immigration and health. Farida was named one of the 10 Most Influential Latina Journalists in California in 2022 by the California Chicano News Media Association. Before joining KQED, she worked as a producer and reporter at Radio Bilingüe, a national public radio network. Farida earned her master’s degree in journalism from Stanford University.
Olivia Konotey-Ahulu
Olivia Konotey-Ahulu is a business reporter from the UK who has worked for Bloomberg News since 2019. After covering the London housing beat and writing about racial disparities in home ownership, she became Bloomberg UK’s first Equality reporter. Her work on the inequity facing Black Britons in the property market and the real estate sector has won awards from the Foreign Press Association, MHP Mischief 30 to Watch and the National Association of Black Journalists. She was selected to take part in Columbia University's Knight Bagehot fellowship and study business and economics in New York in 2024.
Dina Kraft
Dina Kraft is Israel Correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and co-author of the best-selling, My Friend Anne Frank, a memoir she wrote with Hannah Pick-Goslar. She is a host and founder of Groundwork, a podcast about Jewish and Palestinian activists and previously was opinion editor at Haaretz English. Dina is drawn to stories featuring unlikely connections, dual narratives and the impact of conflict on ordinary lives. She has reported from over a dozen countries and began her overseas career in the Jerusalem bureau of The Associated Press. She was later posted to AP’s Johannesburg bureau where she covered southern Africa. She was the recipient of a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University and an Ochberg fellowship at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, among others.
Dominique Meury
Dominique Meury (née Fong) is a Chinese American writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She spent a decade covering news both big and small, from a Rainbow family gathering of thousands deep in the forest for The Oregonian, to the listing of Bob Hope’s iconic mid-century house in Palm Springs for The Desert Sun, and the impact of speculative housing frenzies on China’s slowing economy for The Wall Street Journal. In China, she wrote for the real-time newswires in Hong Kong and later moved to Beijing, where once a year at the National People’s Congress she would try to flag down Chinese legislative delegates, most in seemingly identical black suits, for a quote about Xi Jinping. She also co-led the media freedoms committee as a board member of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China in Beijing. She left journalism in 2019, when she traveled the world solo to more than a dozen countries and wrote essays about it on her blog, Tiny Urban Hikes. Back in her native Bay Area, she joined the tech industry and is now a senior UX writer at Google, where she uses her writing background to train large language models (LLMs) how to talk like a human.
Massarah Mikati
Massarah Mikati is a seasoned journalist, consultant and trainer dedicated to helping newsrooms and journalists implement more inclusive, culturally competent and community-centered engagement journalism at an institutional level. With a deep commitment to amplifying underrepresented voices, she has pioneered new beats from Upstate New York to Texas showcasing the diversity and complexity of communities of color. Her work focuses on repairing and strengthening the relationship between newsrooms and the communities they serve. The daughter of Lebanese immigrants, Massarah has been passionate about long-form storytelling since the age of 13. Her mission is to explore and expose the nuances of the experiences and identities of marginalized communities — showing the world our communities are not just pawns in a game of political chess, but human beings. Her novel, based in her hometown of Tripoli, Lebanon, navigates the haunting shadows of colonialism, the heartbreak of migration and the intricacies of familial — especially mother-daughter — relationships.
Campbell Robertson
Campbell Robertson has been a journalist with The New York Times for more than twenty years. He has reported on the Broadway theater business, covered the war in Iraq and drew a series of comics from the presidential campaign trail. For most of his career at the Times he has been a reporter on the national desk, first in the South, where he wrote about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, life inside Alabama prisons and the fallout from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Currently he is the Times’s Mid-Atlantic Bureau Chief, covering seven states and Washington, D.C. Before joining the Times, he taught high school in Tangier, Morocco, where he helped stage a Tennessee Williams play in the middle of the city’s medina. He was born and raised in Alabama.
Michal Schick
Michal Schick is an Orthodox Jewish writer of screen and prose, and a former entertainment journalist, based in New York City. After nearly ten years of work as an entertainment journalist at Hypable.com, Michal served as a staff writer on seasons four through seven of the Emmy Award-winning Netflix series The Dragon Prince. Her prose work has been featured in New Myths Magazine, as well as Joseph Gordon-Levitt's "Tiny Book of Tiny Stories,” and her screenwriting has placed highly at competitions such as the Austin Film Festival, PAGE Awards, CineQuest, and Filmmatic Comedy Screenwriting Competition. Educated in religious schools through the collegiate level, Michal earned her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College in 2016. Michal has ongoing, if inescapably one-sided beef with the Roman Empire, King Henry VIII, and a Sesame Street sketch that scarred her for life.
Jonny Wrate
Jonny Wrate is an investigative reporter with the Latin American team at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). His work uncovers illicit financial flows, offshore shell company structures, and transnational criminal networks. Collaborative projects on which he has worked have won multiple awards and have been published in multiple languages, such as two complex, multi-billion-dollar money laundering schemes set up in the former Soviet Union, and an exposé of a previously unreported Romanian criminal organisation that had embedded itself in the heart of Mexico's tourist destinations. Other topics he has covered include undisclosed lobbying in the US linked to the Azerbaijan government, shell companies owned by babies, corporate environmental crime in Mexico and Central America, and the business and science of cross-continental cocaine production. He previously lived in the Balkans, where he wrote about film and music. He graduated from Cardiff University, and was a participant in the 2025 speculative fiction program of the Under the Volcano writers residency.