Meet our New Fall 2020 Instructors

Clockwise from top left: Queena Kim, Jonathan Blakley, Yumi Wilson, Kavitha Cardoza, Nani Sahra Walker, Wesley Lowery, Anita Varma, Lakshmi Sarah, David Thigpen, Nausheen Dadabhoy

Berkeley Journalism has hired veteran radio producer and senior editor of the Weekend Desk at KQED Queena Kim (’00) as head of our audio program and Jonathan Blakley, executive director of radio programming at KQED to co-teach advanced radio with current lecturer Ethan Lindsey. To teach our introduction to reporting classes, we hired Yumi Wilson, a former news reporter and editor for the San Francisco Chronicle who has been a lecturer in our summer undergraduate minor; Kavitha Cardoza, a radio journalist and former special correspondent at WAMU in Washington; and David E. Thigpen, a former Time Magazine reporter who has been head of our summer undergraduate program. We also hired Nani Sahra Walker (’18), a documentary filmmaker and immersive producer at the Los Angeles Times, to teach introduction to visual journalism; director and cinematographer Nausheen Dadabhoy to teach videography; journalist/author Lakshmi Sarah (’16) to co-teach the master’s project seminar in new media with fellow alum Jeremy Rue (‘07); and Anita Varma, assistant director for journalism and media ethics and social sector ethics at Santa Clara University, to teach the ethics portion of the law and ethics class.

We’ve also hired Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Wesley Lowery to join the Investigative Reporting Program as special projects editor this semester. Lowery comes from The Washington Post, where he was a national correspondent, covering law enforcement, justice and their intersection with politics and policy. Lowery is leading a team of graduate students investigating police misconduct in the United States, and he’s providing guidance on other IRP investigations.