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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Elissa Nadworny speaks with Saadia Pekkanen, director of the Space Law, Data and Policy program at the University of Washington, about debris threatening satellites in space.
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Elissa Nadworny speaks with Leonid Drabkin of the Russian human rights media project OVD-Info, about how Russian citizens are continuing to protest the war despite the threat of punishment.
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In the new horror film, three generations of Korean American women grapple with the haunting repercussions of motherhood. Actors Sandra Oh and Fivel Stewart talk about what made the film so personal. -
Sure, basketball payers have to bust their chops to reach the NCAA Division I tournament, but it's also hard work for college mascots.
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Elissa Nadworny speaks to Peng Shepherd about her new book, "The Cartographers," where the daughter of a murdered map scholar unravels the mystery of a map she finds hidden in his desk.
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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. -
Emmy Ross has a bunch of student debt, so when callers offered to help have the loans forgiven, she was immediately interested. The problem? They were scams. -
NPR's Elissa Nadworny speaks with Belinda Deneen Wallace, a professor at the University of New Mexico, about a new Pew report finding 1 in 10 Black people in the U.S. were born outside the country.
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Student loan scams are on the rise. We cover some of the red flags.
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NPR's Elissa Nadworny speaks with Martin Van Der Werf, director of editorial and education policy at Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce, about their new college rankings.
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NPR's Elissa Nadworny talks with Tessa Hadley about her new novel, Free Love and pivoting to writing novels in her 40s.
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NPR's Elissa Nadworny speaks with actor Anna Chlumsky about Netflix's new limited series Inventing Anna.
