Berkeley Journalism announces new Spring 2022 instructors

Top row, left to right: Giovanni Adams, Lo Bénichou, Lisa Gartner, Aaron Glantz, Jason Jones, Tobin Low; Bottom row, left to right: Yolanda Martinez, Amy Qin, Saumya Roy, Manjula Varghese, Carvell Wallace, Edward Wong.

Dear Berkeley Journalism Community,

Please join me in welcoming the new lecturers who will be teaching this spring semester! We are so thrilled to welcome them and offer our students these wonderful new learning opportunities.

These hires reflect the school’s goal of taking the limits off who gets to be a journalist by determining who trains and mentors them.

Doing searches for virtually all lecturer-taught classes is a key element of our Anti-Racism Plan. This requires an incredible commitment from our community. I am grateful, in particular, to Associate Dean Jeremy Rue who led the search for the new lecturers and put in countless hours in interviews and recruiting. Thank you!

I also want to acknowledge the following faculty members for assisting with the hiring:

• David Barstow, search chair
• Elena Conis, search chair
• Richard Koci Hernandez, search chair
• Queena Kim, search chair

As part of our Anti-Racism Plan, we include student members on all of our search committees. Thank you to these students who assisted:

• Felicia Alvarez
• Freddy Brewster
• Pamela Estrada
• MJ Johnson
• Katie Licari-Kozak
• Xueer Lu
• Mathew Miranda
• Elena Neale-Sacks
• Elgin Nelson
• Myah Overstreet
• Katie Rodriguez
• César Rojas Ángel
• Corey Rose
• Iqra Salah
• Kori Suzuki
• Alfredo Torres
• Michaela Vatcheva
• Gracelynne West
• Brittany Zendejas

We are also grateful for the staff support from Anastacia Kaser and Aimee Larsen.

With so much excitement and deep gratitude,

Geeta Anand
Dean and Professor
Robert A. Peck Chair
Berkeley Journalism

Giovanni Adams – On-Camera Reporting Mini
Giovanni Adams is a professional actor, playwright, and director with over 14 years of experience. He has worked as a communications consultant and coach. He specializes in teaching professionals how to stand comfortably in front of an audience to tell stories of a wide variety with boldness, mastery and style. He has trained students in effective use of reporting, narrative, and presentation skills to tell stories that resonate on the page and appeal to the ear. He’s honed his craft in stage plays at some of the most prominent regional theaters, as well as through appearances in film and television. He’s earned two NAACP Theatre awards and official selection at numerous film festivals.

Lo Bénichou – Interactive Narratives
Lo Bénichou is a creative technologist for the Lab for Engineering and Design in Editorial at The Washington Post. Before joining The Washington Post’s LEDE lab, they worked as a data visualization reporter at CalMatters, where they worked on award-winning reporting and analyzed Covid-19 hospitalization data, investigated the impact of fires on seniors in California and built CalMatters’ 2020 election guide. Before that, they worked at Mapbox as brand partnership lead and storytelling expert, partnering with shows and newsrooms including Netflix’s “Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj,” Mother Jones, The Washington Post and The New York Times to better incorporate maps into storytelling, and data. Lo lives in Oakland and has been in the Bay for 16 years. They’re from Paris, France. They have a dog named Bruno, who is the best dog.

Lisa Gartner – Investigative Reporting Seminar
Lisa Gartner is the investigative editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, where she leads investigations and narrative projects. As a reporter at the Tampa Bay Times and Philadelphia Inquirer, she investigated systemic racism in a local school district and violent abuse at the nation’s oldest reform school, earning the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, George Polk Awards for both Education and Justice Reporting, the Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism and the Livingston Award for Young Journalists, among other honors. She is a graduate of Northwestern University, and lives in Sonoma County with her husband and their two dogs.

Aaron Glantz – Co-teaching Digital Accountability: Exploring Section 230
Aaron Glantz is senior investigations editor for The California Newsroom, a collaboration of California public radio stations, NPR and CalMatters. His work has sparked more than a dozen Congressional hearings, numerous laws, and criminal probes by the DEA, FBI, Pentagon and Federal Trade Commission. A two-time Peabody Award-winner, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, multiple Emmy nominee, and winner of the Selden Ring and Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award, his work has appeared in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, NBC Nightly News, Good Morning America and the PBS NewsHour. A former senior reporter at Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and a JSK Fellow at Stanford University, his books include Homewreckers, The War Come Home and How America Lost Iraq.

Jason Jones – Sports Reporting Mini
Jason Jones is a Staff Writer for The Athletic, covering the NBA and Culture. Previously he spent 16 years at the Sacramento Bee, nine years covering the Sacramento Kings, and four years covering the Oakland Raiders. Jones is an alum of Berkeley Journalism and taught sports reporting at the J-School in 2007.

Tobin Low – Advanced Audio
Tobin Low is an editor for This American Life who manages a team of producers, pitching, reporting and structuring stories. Before coming to This American Life, he also co-hosted Nancy, a show about the contemporary queer experience, and also served as a producer for Radiolab on the first season of More Perfect. His work has appeared on Marketplace, Studio 360, and the Codebreaker podcast. Tobin is a graduate of the Transom Story Workshop, and was selected by the Association of Independents in Radio to be a New Voices Scholar in 2014. He has a masters of music degree from The Juilliard School.

Yolanda Martinez – Co-Teaching Intro to Coding Interactives
Yolanda “Yoli” Martinez is a visual journalism developer on The Washington Post engineering team. She was previously a newsroom developer at The San Francisco Chronicle with a focus on tools and interactives for Hearst newspapers. Prior to that, she has used data and interactive graphics to tell stories about finance, criminal justice, banking and immigration at The Wall Street Journal and The Marshall Project. She has a master’s degree from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Amy Qin – Co-Teaching Reporting on China
Amy Qin is an international correspondent for The New York Times covering the intersection of culture, politics and society in China. For eight years she was based in Beijing, and her reporting has taken her from the frontlines of the coronavirus epidemic in Wuhan to the antigovernment protests in Hong Kong. In 2020, she was on a team of Times journalists that was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for a series exposing China’s crackdown on Muslim minorities in Xinjiang. Fluent in Mandarin, Qin is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and Oxford University.

Saumya Roy – India Reporting
Saumya Roy is the author of Castaway Mountain: Love and Loss Among the Waste Pickers of Mumbai, a narrative nonfiction account of the garbage landfill of Mumbai. The book is among NPR’s Best Loved books of 2021. She has written for Forbes India magazine, Mint newspaper, Outlook magazine, wsj.com, bbc.com, thewire.in and Bloomberg News among other publications. She also co- founded and ran Vandana Foundation to support the livelihoods of Mumbai’s poorest micro entrepreneurs by giving small, low interest loans. She received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, Blue Mountain Center, Carey Institute for Global Good and Sangam House to write Castaway Mountain. She has Masters Degrees in journalism from Northwestern University and Mumbai’s Sophia College, where she teaches magazine writing.

Manjula Varghese – Video for the Web
Manjula Varghese is a multi-Emmy and Telly award winning documentary filmmaker who has over 20 years of experience producing short and long form content. Currently she works as a digital producer for KQED. Prior to KQED, she worked as a video producer for the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times. She also co-founded the film production company Mirrorlake Films. Her produced work ranges from films covering PTSD in veterans to gun violence in small urban cities. Her work has been published in PBS, PBS Plus, America Reframed, The New York Times, NYT Op-Docs, AJ+, Blavity, Science Friday, KQED Arts, PBS NewsHour, Amazon and the San Francisco Chronicle. She was the vice president of the Asian American Journalist Association Bay Area chapter and governor of the local NATAS chapter from 2017 – 2020. She is a member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia and Video Consortium. She has received numerous journalism awards and most recently she was the recipient of the San Francisco Individual Artist Grant in 2020. She holds a B.A. in Film from Brigham Young University and a Masters in Journalism from Berkeley.

Carvell Wallace – Intro to Narrative Writing
Carvell Wallace is a New York Times Bestselling author, memoirist, and award-winning podcaster who covers race, arts, culture, film and music. He is a regular long form contributor to the New York Times Magazine where his profile of Riz Ahmed was a cover story in August 2018. In 2019 Wallace published The Sixth Man, co-written with Golden State Warriors forward Andre Iguodala. The memoir of Iguodala’s life in basketball — released on Dutton press —- spent four weeks on the Times bestseller list for Hardcover Non-fiction, 14 weeks on the Sports Non-fiction list, and made Barack Obama’s year end list of favorite books. He is currently at work on a memoir on childhood trauma and recovery, “Profiles In Hurt.” Before writing professionally, Carvell spent fifteen years in youth non-profit doing direct case management and program design for youth populations in incarceration, and foster care. He is a graduate of the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts and holds a B.F.A. in Theatre from the Tisch School at New York University.

Edward Wong – Co-Teaching Reporting on China
Edward Wong is a diplomatic and international correspondent for The New York Times who reports on foreign policy from Washington. He has spent most of his career abroad, reporting for 13 years from China and Iraq for The Times. As Beijing bureau chief, he ran The Times’s largest overseas operation. He has filed dispatches from North Korea, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Tibet, Nepal, Mongolia, Myanmar, Vietnam and Indonesia, among other places. He was on the final flight of the Concorde. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University from 2017 to 2018 and taught international reporting at Princeton University as a Ferris Professor of Journalism in 2017. He is an associate at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Wong received a Livingston Award for his coverage of the Iraq War and was on a team from The Times’s Baghdad Bureau that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. He has two awards from the Society of Publishers in Asia for coverage of China. Mr. Wong graduated with honors from the University of Virginia with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. He has dual master’s degrees in journalism and international studies from the University of California at Berkeley. He has studied Mandarin Chinese at the Beijing Language and Culture University, Taiwan University and Middlebury College.