Missing Family During the Pandemic? Celebrate Your Ancestry With Recipes

FEATURE | Homemade cardamom bread sprinkled with pearl sugar is an annual treat in the DeRosa home in Cranston, Rhode Island. The family’s two young boys, 11 and 14, tell stories about their Granduncle Olof as it bakes: his family farm in New England, his cows, his truck, his big hands, and his recipe for bread, which he learned from his mother, who immigrated from Sweden. The DeRosa family found that making ancestral recipes like cardamon bread lifted the boys’ spirits when they started growing tired of homeschooling...

The Phillips’ Exhibition Community in Focus is Cathartic After 2020

REVIEW | Devastation and rebuilding. Mistrust and faith. Isolation and unity. These are just some of the contradictions that make the Phillips Collection’s year-end exhibition Community in Focus a discordant experience that is both heart-wrenching and heartening—and true to life. Summarizing 2020 isn’t easy, but this project attempts to do just that through a powerful display of hundreds of images from the indescribable last year. The digital exhibition is up on the museum’s website until Feb. 7...

Reporting on Crises? Yoga Can Help Cope With the Stress

ANALYSIS | A masked assailant points a gun towards a group of journalists who are blindfolded, hands tied behind their backs, as part of a Hostile Environment and First Aid Training (HEFAT) administered by the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF). The training is designed prepare participants for situations that they could potentially deal with on the job. “It was just terrifying,” said reporter Amaris Castillo, one of the IWMF fellows at the time, in a video about the training. To relieve participants...

D.C. Will House a First-Of-Its-Kind Museum Dedicated to Diplomacy

FEATURE | Ambassador Clyde D. Taylor faced threats during his 34-year career as a foreign service officer for the U.S. Department of State. He served in Iran from 1975 to 1979. “The entire time I was in Iran, my name was on a repeatedly freshened list, a kill list, which would be shoved under our door where we lived,” Taylor says. Taylor’s work took him to more than 65 countries, and he was assigned to live overseas on tours in Panama, Australia, El Salvador, Iran, and Paraguay, where he was the U.S. ambassador...

10 Ways Journalists Can Incorporate the Everyday Into Their Reporting

HOW-TO GUIDE | In March 2012, journalists Austin Merrill and Peter DiCampo traveled to Ivory Coast on a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. They realized that by reporting only sensational, breaking news stories, they weren’t presenting a full picture of what they were seeing. They were simply perpetuating stereotypes. Merrill and DiCampo’s desire to share what everyday life was like in Ivory Coast inspired them to create Everyday Africa, a photojournalism project...

Local Arts Groups Rely on Community Funding in the Absence of Government Support

FEATURE | One of the foundations of improv comedy is the concept of “Yes, and.” First, the performers must agree to the situation that has been set up. Then, they must add to it. DC Improv owner and comedy school principal Allyson Jaffe ties that concept to the coronavirus crisis. “We’re in the longest improv scene of our lives right now with COVID-19,” she says. “We just have to basically say this is a situation that’s happening and we have to ‘Yes, and’ it.” To comply with the D.C. government’s rapidly changing public health...

Setting the Table

MULTIMEDIA COLLABORATION | As a 2019–2020 Faith Flanagan Fellow with the D.C. chapter of ArtTable—the foremost national membership organization for women-identifying and nonbinary professionals in the visual arts—I collaborated with a team to complete a digital storytelling project about prominent women in the city's art history. We each conducted interviews and archival research; I also created social media visuals and my photography is featured throughout.