Announcing the 2010 Ochberg Fellows

The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism today announced the recipients of the 2010 Dart Center Ochberg Fellowships. This year's Dart Center Ochberg Fellowships for mid-career journalists interested in improving coverage of violent events go to:

Solange Azevedo, Revista IstoÉ, Sao Paulo, Brazil
Cecilia Ballí, Texas Monthly
Patrick Farrell, The Miami Herald
Susan Kaplan, WFCR, Amherst, Massachusetts
Russell Lewis, NPR, Birmingham, Alabama
Teru Kuwayama, Photographer, New York City
Brett McLeod, Nine Network, Australia
Jacques Menasche, Independent Journalist, New York City
Dave Philipps, Colorado Springs Gazette, Colorado Springs, Colorado
Juliana Ruhfus, Al Jazeera English, UK/Germany

The Ochberg Fellowships were established in 1999 by the Dart Center for journalists seeking to deepen their coverage of violence and traumatic events. Fellowships are awarded to mid-career journalists in all media who have covered issues ranging from street crime, family violence and natural disasters to war and genocide.

Fellows attend an intensive weeklong seminar program, including briefings by leading interdisciplinary experts in the trauma field and discussions with journalist colleagues, and attend the annual conference of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.

The fellowship was established in partnership with the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. The fellowship is named in honor of psychiatrist Frank Ochberg, M.D., a pioneer in trauma study.

BRIEF BIOGRAPHIES OF THE 2010 FELLOWS:

Solange Azevedo has been a journalist for Brazilian magazines for eleven years and has worked on more than 30 cover stories. She has been recognized with awards from many news organizations and was named a winner of the 2009 Human Rights and Service to the Community Award by the Inter American Press Association. Her piece, “They Killed,” was published in the book "Lo Mejor del Periodismo de América Latina” (“The Best of the Journalism of Latin America”) – a work sponsored by Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (New Journalism Foundation). This foundation was created by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. In 2006, Azevedo was selected by the World Press Institute to participate in a highly competitive exchange program for journalists in the United States. Azevedo has also taught investigative journalism to university students in three Brazilian cities. Since October 2009, she has been an editor for the magazine IstoÉ.

Cecilia Ballí is a contributor to Texas Monthly and Harper’s magazines. A native of Brownsville, Texas, she has researched and written about the U.S.-Mexico border for many years. Her personal essays have appeared in various anthologies, including “Puro Border” (Cinco Puntos Press), “Colonize This!” (Seal Press), “Border-line Personalities” (Rayo/Harpercollins), “Rio Grande” (UT Press), and “Hecho en Tejas” (UNM Press). She was a finalist in 2004 for the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists and the John Bartlow Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism. That same year, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists named her Emerging Journalist of the Year. In 2008, she was a distinguished finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award given by the Columbia University School of Journalism. Ballí began her journalism career as a reporter for The Brownsville Herald and the San Antonio Express-News. She is a graduate of Stanford and Rice universities and lives in Austin, where she is an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Texas. She writes about violence along the U.S.-Mexican border and is working on a book about the construction of a border fence.

Patrick Farrell has been a photographer at The Miami Herald since 1987. He is the recipient of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography for his photographs of the devastation in Haiti caused by a particularly brutal hurricane season. Farrell has documented three decades of major news events, both locally and abroad, including the 1989 race riots in Miami’s Overtown neighborhood; political and civil unrest in Haiti during the 1994 military rule of that country; the 1999 earthquake in Turkey; the Columbine High School massacre; childhood poverty in the Americas and Hurricane Andrew’s 1992 path of destruction in South Florida, for which he and the Miami Herald staff won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Farrell has won numerous awards for his coverage of Haiti, including the first place 2009 National Headliner Award for Photo Essay, two first-place awards in 2008 from Pictures of the Year International, and a Feature Photography Award in 2008 from the Overseas Press Club. He started his career working at two small South Florida dailies.

Susan Kaplan has been a public radio reporter at the NPR affiliate WFCR, based in Western Massachusetts, since 1995. Her work focuses on education, innovative technologies and most recently women in the military. Her stories have been heard on NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered and On the Media. Most recently she reported on military sexual trauma among women veterans that ran during a week-long series on All Things Considered. Her work has received numerous A.P. awards. For six years she hosted a weekly television public affairs program on PBS affiliate WGBY in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Teru Kuwayama is a freelance photographer based in New York City. His first published photographs were in Maximum Rock'n'Roll, an international punk rock fanzine based in the Bay Area. In 1998, he began working as a contributing photographer to Life magazine, and then for other publications including Time, Newsweek, National Geographic and Outside. Since 2001, his work has focused on conflict and the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Kashmir. He is the co-founder of the website Lightstalkers.org, an online network of photographers, filmmakers, journalists, and members of the military and NGO communities. In 2007, he launched The Battlespace Project, a traveling group exhibition of photographs from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His work was featured in Esquire Magazine's "The Best and Brightest" of 2004 and received numerous awards, including a 2009-2010 Knight Fellowship at Stanford, a Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor award in 2009, an Alicia Patterson Fellowship in 2006, a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in 2002 and the Alexia Award for World Peace in 1999. He is currently a 2010 TED Global fellow.

Russell Lewis is the Southern Bureau Chief for NPR News, a post he has held since 2006. Lewis focuses on the issues and news central to the Southeast — from Florida to Virginia to Texas, including West Virginia, Kentucky and Oklahoma. In addition to developing and expanding NPR's coverage of the region, Lewis assigns and edits stories from station-based reporters and freelancers alike, working closely with local correspondents and public radio stations. He also spent a year in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, coordinating NPR's coverage of the rebuilding effort. He is currently based in Birmingham, Alabama. Lewis began his public radio career in 1992 at NPR member station WUFT in Gainesville, Florida, where he was an executive news producer. He spent time at WSVH in Savannah, Georgia. Lewis also worked for Kansas Public Radio and reported on the state legislature. He spent six years on the West Coast, working at one of public radio's flagship stations: KPBS in San Diego, where he was senior editor and a reporter. He most recently was assistant news director and talk show host at WGCU in Fort Myers, Florida. He was a frequent contributor to NPR, specializing in military and business issues.

Jacques Menasche is an independent writer, editor, and filmmaker. He began his career as a desk clerk at The New York Times and has since covered conflict and culture around the world. His writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, ESPN The Magazine, Vanity Fair, Fader, The Independent, and Corriere dela Sera. He helped author 2003’s “Red-Color News Soldier: A Chinese Photographer’s Odyssey Through the Cultural Revolution” (Phaidon) and 2009’s “44 Days: Iran and the Remaking of the World” (National Geographic Books) — both winners of the Overseas Press Club of America’s Olivier Rebbot Award. In 2007, his television documentary about heroin addicts in Afghanistan, “Brothers of Kabul,” was broadcast on CNN International and al-Jazeera, receiving a nomination from the Rory Peck Trust and winning Australia’s Walkley Award for Best Television Current Affairs Reporting.

Brett McLeod is a journalist with the Nine Network in Melbourne Australia. His reporting has taken him all over the world, most recently to Bangkok, where he covered the Red Shirt protests and to the conflict zones of Baghdad, Beirut and Dili. In 2002, McLeod was posted to Nine's European bureau, where he covered major stories of the day, including attacks in Israel, Madrid and Istanbul. In 2004, he traveled to Banda Aceh, where he covered the devastating aftermath of the Asian tsunami. One of his reports on the tsunami was recognized with a Quill award for best news story. He also helped to produce a DVD to help news professionals cope with the aftermath of traumatic stories.

Dave Philipps is a reporter for The Colorado Springs Gazette, where he writes long-form investigative pieces as well as light features. He was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in the local reporting category for his series, “Casualties of War,” on combat soldiers at Fort Carson returning from war and committing violence in Colorado Springs. His work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, Los Angeles Times and Philadelphia Inquirer, among others, and won awards from the Colorado Press Association, Colorado Associated Press Editors and Reporters and Society of Professional Journalists. In 2008 he was given a national first-place award for best feature reporting, for his coverage of the environment, from the National Association of Sunday and Feature Editors. He is a native of Colorado Springs, graduated from Middlebury College in 2000 and received a Masters degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2002.

Juliana Ruhfus is an award-winning reporter and filmmaker who produces programmes with a human rights and investigative focus from around the world. For the past four years, she has been the reporter on the Al Jazeera English flagship People & Power strand. A frequent visitor to areas of conflict, Ruhfus’s particular ambition is to make films that explore “shades of grey” – to tell the complex personal stories behind the news headlines. Outside television, Ruhfus has worked as an expert to the UN Security Council Sanctions committee tasked with investigating violations of the arms embargo on Somalia, has consulted on investigations into the illegal arms trade and has written for newspapers.