Valeria Fernández is an independent investigative journalist focused on amplifying voices of immigrant communities. She recently received a Nieman Visiting Fellowship at Harvard University to develop Comadres al Aire. Her most recent work can be found in The Guardian, California Sunday Magazine, Latino USA, 70 Million and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting. She has produced documentaries and reports for Discovery Spanish, CNN Español, Sky TV, Al Jazeera, and PBS, and co-directed the award-winning documentary, “Two Americans,” which follows the plight of a 9-year-old girl fighting to stop her parents’ deportations under the reign of notorious Arizona sheriff, Joe Arpaio. Her reporting on abuses of incarcerated Central American youth in Mexico was published by PRI’s TheWorld and NPR’s Spanish-language podcast, Radio Ambulante. She was a 2020 National Health Fellow at the Center for Health Reporting at USC Annenberg. Her fellowship project led to the broadcast of a series of stories in Spanish for Radio Bilingue and in English for PRX’s The World on how immigrant communities and people of color in Arizona are organizing around healing during the COVID-19 pandemic. She is currently a mentor at the Center for Health Reporting for journalists reporting on domestic violence. As an immigrant from Uruguay, she started her career at La Voz newspaper and later became a correspondent for CNN Spanish, and the Associated Press. She is a 2009 Feet in Two Worlds fellow where she received training to work on public radio and crossover to English media. She was a finalist for the 2020 James Beard Award for investigative reporting. In 2018, Heising-Simons Foundation honored her with the $100,000 American Mosaic Journalism Prize for her freelance coverage of underrepresented communities. She is a former professor and director of Cronkite Noticias, a student-led Spanish news service at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism. Early in her career she was recognized for her immigration coverage with multiple awards at the Arizona Press Club and the Arizona Newspaper Association. She lives in Phoenix with her husband and they are raising a curious toddler.
