Elissa Nadworny
Elissa Nadworny reports on all things college for NPR, following big stories like unprecedented enrollment declines, college affordability, the student debt crisis and workforce training. During the 2020-2021 academic year, she traveled to dozens of campuses to document what it was like to reopen during the coronavirus pandemic. Her work has won several awards including a 2020 Gracie Award for a story about student parents in college, a 2018 James Beard Award for a story about the Chinese-American population in the Mississippi Delta and a 2017 Edward R. Murrow Award for excellence in innovation.
Nadworny uses multiplatform storytelling – incorporating radio, print, comics, photojournalism, and video — to put students at the center of her coverage. Some favorite story adventures include crawling in the sewers below campus to test wastewater for the coronavirus, yearly deep-dives into the most popular high school plays and musicals and an epic search for the history behind her classroom skeleton.
Before joining NPR in 2014, Nadworny worked at Bloomberg News, reporting from the White House. A recipient of the McCormick National Security Journalism Scholarship, she spent four months reporting on U.S. international food aid for USA Today, traveling to Jordan to talk with Syrian refugees about food programs there.
Originally from Erie, Pa., Nadworny has a bachelor's degree in documentary film from Skidmore College and a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.
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NPR's Elissa Nadworny speaks with Mary Ziegler of the UC Davis School of Law about uncertainties and likely legal battles in post-Roe America.
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Kenny Butler and Daniel Duron worked toward their degrees while in prison. Their journey could become more common with Pell grants becoming available to incarcerated people. -
NPR's Elissa Nadworny talks to Iman Vellani, the Pakistani-Canadian actress who plays Kamala Khan on "Ms. Marvel," about what the show means for representation on television. -
A third of Ukrainians have called Russian their mother tongue. Russian statues and cultural markers abound. Are these influences inherently toxic? The war is prompting emotional conversations. -
This year's winner of our Student Podcast Challenge, junior, Teagan Nam, described how their friends and classmates turned to memes and social media as a coping method. -
Many residents of the Ukrainian capital couldn't leave — even during the worst days of Russia's bombardment. Meet some of the 80-somethings who stayed behind. -
More than 15,000 babies have been born in Ukraine since the start of the war. At a maternity hospital in Kyiv, new parents tell of the long road it took to get them to safety.
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Enrollment in two-year colleges has dropped nationwide by about 750,000 students. But degree programs in construction trades are booming. -
With their hometown of Chernihiv in ruins, one family escaped before a key bridge out of the city was destroyed. They're now among an estimated 6.5 million Ukrainians internally displaced by the war. -
More than 1,700 Ukrainians are studying in the U.S. Three of them spoke to NPR about their feelings of guilt and distraction, and what they're doing to help.
