Lisa Armstrong

Lisa Armstrong

Lisa Armstrong

Faculty – Assistant Professor

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Lisa Armstrong is an award-winning journalist with credits in The Guardian, The Texas Tribune, The New Yorker, The Marshall Project and other outlets. For the past decade she has been reporting mainly on incarceration, and is currently reporting on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention and deportations.

Professor Armstrong has reported from several countries, including Sierra Leone, Kenya, Jamaica 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.

She 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.

Professor Armstrong has written about people who were sentenced to life without parole as minors, solitary confinement and other issues. She also produced a documentary for CBS News about how subpar mental health care provided by for-profit companies led to in an increase in suicides in state prisons, and directed a documentary about a young man who was incarcerated in an adult prison when he was 16. The film was featured in the Social Impact track at SXSW. Professor Armstrong has used her audio reporting to partner with musicians, poets and other artists for live performances at Carnegie Hall, SFJAZZ and other venues.

Professor 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.

Before coming to UC Berkeley, she was an associate professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, where she taught for 12 years. She has also taught in several California state prisons and currently teaches journalism at the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.

Professor Armstrong is on the boards of the National Association of Black Journalists; Cityside, a Bay Area non-profit news outlet that produces Berkeleyside, the Oaklandside and Richmondside; Press On, a southern media collective for movement journalism; and Type Investigations, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to transforming the field of independent investigative journalism. She is also on the advisory board of the Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism, and is a trainer for the Global Center for Journalism and Trauma.

EMPLOYERS

  • Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, Associate Professor

PUBLICATIONS & OTHER WORK

  • https://www.themarshallproject.org/2021/06/29/lost-opportunity-lost-lives
    Lost Opportunity, Lost Lives
    During the pandemic, prison officials could have prevented sickness and death by releasing those who were most vulnerable to coronavirus and least likely to reoffend — older incarcerated people.

    https://theintercept.com/2016/06/03/the-u-s-is-the-only-country-that-routinely-sentences-children-to-life-in-prison-without-parole/
    Hard Time
    The U.S. Is the Only Country That Routinely Sentences Children to Life in Prison Without Parole

  • https://www.texastribune.org/2023/04/28/texas-juvenile-justice-suicide-joshua-keith-beasley/

  • https://www.texastribune.org/2022/08/03/texas-juvenile-prison-mother-son/

  • https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/10/black-women-infertility-causes-treatment-inequity-healthcare

  • https://www.cbsnews.com/news/private-prison-health-care-perils-cbsn-originals/

TEACHING SCHEDULE:

Sec. Title Time Location
001 J200 Reporting the News (Section 1)
Fall 2026 		Mon/Wed 9am-12pm 101 North Gate (Production Lab) — 101 North Gate (Production Lab)
011 J298 Berkeley Changemaker: Creating New Models for Journalism
Spring 2026 		—
001 J298 Feature Writing
Spring 2026 		—
004 J211 Reporting the News Seminar (Section 4)
Fall 2025 		Wed 9am-12pm 127 North Gate (Rodriguez Room) — 127 North Gate (Rodriguez Room)

REPORTING INTERESTS

Immigration, Immigration Policy, Incarceration, race in the U.S., systemic racism