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.
-
It's the first day of school in Ukraine, where about 2,300 educational institutions have been damaged and nearly 300 destroyed. Teachers are supporting children who have been severely traumatized.
-
As a stalemate sets in on Ukraine's eastern front line, a city lives in limbo with constant shelling, limited fuel and spotty utilities. The government ordered evacuations but some residents remain. -
The government has sent evacuation orders to Ukraine's Donbas region but many remain. One sparsely open city has become a hub for Ukrainian military members taking a break from the front line.
-
A mission to understand what's happening at the largest nuclear power plant in Europe is underway amid renewed shelling and mounting fears of a potential nuclear accident.
-
Russia invaded Ukraine six months ago. In that time, thousands of people have been killed, cities destroyed, millions of people displaced and the Ukrainian economy has been battered. -
It's been six months since Russia launched its full scale invasion on Ukraine. Now it's a war of attrition that has led to a global food crisis, inflation across the world and devastation in Ukraine.
-
In many U.S. schools, the human skeletons hanging in biology or art classrooms were actual remains. Here's the origin story of one set of bones in an Erie, Penn., high school.
-
Requirements to test and mask and be vaccinated are becoming less common as colleges shift away from treating COVID-19 as an emergency. -
Megan Miranda's latest summer thriller, The Last to Vanish, is set in a small hiking town in North Carolina, where 7 people have disappeared in the woods. Were they all accidents or was it something more sinister? -
NPR's Elissa Nadworny speaks to musician Patty Griffin about her new album, "Tape," a collection of unreleased demos and home recordings.
-
NPR's Elissa Nadworny speaks to Nikita Mhatre, co-president of a student chapter of the advocacy group If/When/How, about students mobilizing for abortion rights.
-
NPR's Elissa Nadworny talks with Kim Hammond, a resident of Uvalde, Texas, about how the community there is coping one month after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School.
