The Investigative Reporting Program announces 2019-20 fellows

June 1, 2019

Jameka Autry, Lucas Guilkey and Rachel Witte

The IRP is pleased to announce its fellows for 2019-20:

Jameka Autry
Jameka Autry is a director, producer and 2017 Impact Partners Creative Producer Fellow. In 2018, she was selected as part of the inaugural DOC NYC 40 Under 40 List. She started her career at Break Thru Films and also was part of the original productions team at Cinereach. She has worked on the creative development and production of feature documentaries, narrative films, commercials, short films and multimedia campaigns. Her films have screened at the Sundance Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, SXSW and New Directors New Films.

Recently, she was a line producer on Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. (Sundance ’18) and served as a consulting producer on Jeremiah Zagar’s We the Animals (Sundance ’18) and CNN Films’ Love Gilda (Tribeca Opening Night Film ’18). She most recently completed work on Ernie & Joe, which premiered at SXSW and received jury awards at SXSW and the Boston International Film Festival. She is currently working on directing her first feature film, The United States of America v. Billie Holiday, for which she was recently awarded one of four Sundance/A&E Brave Storyteller Awards.

Lucas Guilkey
Lucas Guilkey, a 2019 graduate of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism is a documentary filmmaker and video journalist based in Oakland, California. His work focuses on many of the socially and politically relevant stories of our time — from mass incarceration to climate change, and from budget cuts to reproductive healthcare. He recently completed a short documentary about a mother’s fight for truth and justice after her son’s mysterious death in a Santa Rita jail (What Happened to Dujuan Armstrong?) and is currently producing a documentary about the 2013 California prisoner hunger strikes protesting indefinite solitary confinement. He received his bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University.

Rachel Witte
Rachel Witte, a 2014 graduate of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, is an investigative journalist whose television and documentary work has appeared on NBC Bay Area, VICE, CNN and other outlets. Witte’s work as an investigative producer at NBC Bay Area earned some of broadcast journalism’s highest honors, including an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award and a national Edward R. Murrow Award. She was a finalist for the Livingston Award in 2018.

About the IRP Fellowships
In 2007, in response to cutbacks at major news organizations, the Investigative Reporting Program established the first postgraduate fellowships in investigative reporting in the nation. This yearlong program is without peer at any academic institution. It’s designed to enable journalists with a proven ability to tell complex stories in the public interest to pursue a story for one year by providing them with a salary, benefits, editorial guidance, and a $10,000 research stipend that can be used for travel, equipment, documents and other expenses relevant to work on the project. The fellowships are open to all working investigative journalists, but preference is given to graduates of UC Berkeley’s master’s program in journalism.

 

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