2024 Dart Award Final Judging Committee

The final judging committee selected two Dart Award winners and two honorable mentions

Lisa Armstrong is an award-winning journalist with credits in The Intercept, The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, The New Yorker, and other outlets. She has reported from several countries, including Sierra Leone, Kenya, and the Philippines. From 2010 to 2014, she reported from Haiti through grants from The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and NYU. She has been featured on NPR and the BBC, discussing rape in the camps in Haiti and HIV/AIDS in the aftermath of the earthquake. Armstrong received the National Press Club’s Joan Friedenberg Award for Online Journalism and an award for investigative reporting for an article about African-American women who were sterilized by the state of North Carolina. She is currently reporting on incarceration and has had grants from Type Investigations, The Carter Center, and the Fund for Investigative Journalism/Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism to support her work. She has written about the spread of COVID-19 in New York State prisons and Miami jails, and produced a documentary for CBS News about the role that poor mental health care provided by for-profit companies has played in an increase in suicides in state prisons. Armstrong also directed a documentary about a young man who was incarcerated in an adult prison when he was 16. The film, “Little Boy Lost,” was paired with live music and spoken word poetry as narration. It was featured in the Social Impact track at SXSW 2018. Armstrong was a 2020-2021 Knight-Wallace Reporting Fellow, 2019 United States Artists Fellow in Writing, and a 2018 Justice Reporting Fellow for the John Jay/Langeloth Foundation Fellowship on Reinventing Solitary Confinement.

Carlos Gonzalez is a veteran staff photographer at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. He has covered a wide range of assignments from local news, sports and features to international stories.

His work has been recognized with various honors, including Pictures of the Year International, National Press Photographers Association, and the Dart Awards for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma.

He is a 2022 Dart Center Ochberg Fellow and currently an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota teaching photojournalism. Gonzalez has extensively covered the protests and unrest following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. He followed it up with a project about Floyd in his hometown of Houston, spending time in the Third Ward neighborhood where he grew up with his friends and family members. Gonzalez’s work was part of the Star Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the police killing of Floyd.

 

Sacha Pfeiffer is a correspondent for NPR's Investigations team and a guest host for NPR's national shows. She came to NPR from the Boston Globe's Spotlight team, whose stories on the Catholic Church's cover-up of clergy sex abuse won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, among other honors. That reporting is the subject of the movie Spotlight, which won the 2016 Oscar for Best Picture.

Pfeiffer was also a senior reporter and host of All Things Considered and Radio Boston at WBUR in Boston, where she won a national 2012 Edward R. Murrow Award for broadcast reporting. While at WBUR, she was also a guest host for NPR's nationally syndicated On Point and Here & Now, and anchored election coverage, debates, political panels and other special events. She came to radio as a senior reporter covering health, science, medicine and the environment, and her on-air work received numerous awards from the Radio & Television News Directors Association and the Associated Press.

Pfeiffer was a John S. Knight journalism fellow at Stanford University, where she studied at Stanford Law School. She is a co-author of the book Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church and has taught journalism at Boston University's College of Communication.

Raquel Rutledge is the investigations editor for The Examination. She joined the nonprofit start-up in 2023 after two decades as an investigative reporter and deputy editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where she covered a variety of subjects from health and science to crime and taxes. Her investigation into fraud in Wisconsin’s day care subsidy program won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. In 2011 Rutledge was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University studying food regulation. The following year she led an investigation into a local company responsible for tainted alcohol wipes linked to the death of a 2-year-old boy. The series, "Shattered Trust," won a Gerald Loeb Award and other national accolades.  More recently, Rutledge uncovered how a chemical known to cause deadly lung disease is endangering coffee workers and those who use e-cigarettes. In addition, her investigations into deaths and injuries of tourists in Mexico and the dangers barrel recycling plants pose to workers and nearby residents were honored with national awards. In 2020, Rutledge helped expose how hospitals fail to protect nurses and other staff from serious – sometimes deadly – workplace violence, while instead focusing expenditures on building aesthetics and executive pay. That work, too, earned national recognition, including being named a finalist for a Gerald Loeb award. In 2022, she led an investigation into electrical fires in Milwaukee, uncovering how they hit Black renters hardest and how lawmakers and regulators do little to address the problem. That series, “Wires and Fires,” was named a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service.  Most recently, she partnered with Ken Armstrong of ProPublica to co-author “The Landlord & the Tenant,” which won a 2023 “Elle” National Magazine Award.

Soraya Seedat is a Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Executive Head of the Department of Psychiatry at Stellenbosch University. She held the South African Research Chair in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder for 15 years (until the end of 2022) and currently directs the South African Medical Research Council Unit on the Genomics of Brain Disorders. She has more than 25 years of clinical, epidemiological and basic neuroscience research experience as a psychiatrist working in the field of traumatic stress, anxiety and neuroAIDS and has published over 500 peer-reviewed journal manuscripts, co-edited four books and 30 book chapters. She has served two terms as the president of the College of Psychiatrists of South Africa and three terms as secretary and is currently the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Colleges of Medicine of South Africa.

Soraya is an expert in the field of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and anxiety disorders in adolescents and adults, and in the investigation of mechanisms of risk and resilience in adolescent and adult samples, and has published widely in these areas. She has ongoing projects in PTSD, anxiety disorders, neuroAIDS and fetal alcohol spectrum disorders. She has also been involved in multiple research training, capacity building and leadership development activities in sub-Saharan Africa and internationally, supported by NIMH grants and other funding initiatives.

Soraya is currently president-elect of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.