2024 LaunchPad Fellowship Mentors

Sunnie R. Clahchischiligi

Sunnie, Diné, is the Indigenous Affairs Editor for High Country News and serves on the Indigenous Journalists Association (IJA) board of directors. She has reported for the Navajo Times, Osage News, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The New York Times and others. Her work has won multiple awards including the $20,000 Doris O’Donnell Innovations in Investigative Journalism Fellowship from Point Park University and IJA’s 2022 Richard LaCourse Award for Investigative Journalism alongside the Indigenous Investigative Collective. Sunnie was inducted into the inaugural class of the 2022 North American Indigenous Athletics Hall of Fame for sports writing. She holds a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Writing from the University of New Mexico, and teaches at Arizona State University. Sunnie is from T’iis Názbąs, Arizona.

 

Emily Elena Dugdale

Emily is a Los Angeles-based journalist covering criminal justice and a Pulitzer Center AI Accountability fellow. Her work has appeared in ProPublica, NPR, Marketplace, the Los Angeles Times, LAist, KPCC-FM and LA Public Press, among other publications. Her investigation into the role of sheriff’s deputies in a California desert school district won a Golden Mic Award for investigative storytelling. Emily is a 2022 Maynard 200 fellow and former LA Press Club board member. She co-facilitates a mentorship program for emerging audio creators through the LA Radio Club. 

 


Ruxandra Guidi

Ruxandra has been telling stories for more than two decades for public radio, podcasts and magazines, working across the U.S. and as a freelance foreign correspondent based in Bolivia and Ecuador. She is the president of the board of Homelands Productions, a journalism nonprofit cooperative founded in 1989, and a columnist for the 54-year-old nonprofit magazine High Country News. She also serves on the board of El Tímpano, a reporting lab amplifying the voices of Oakland’s Latino and Mayan immigrants. As a former assistant professor of practice and assistant director of the Bilingual Journalism Program at the University of Arizona’s School of Journalism, Ruxandra advised students and taught audio storytelling, feature writing and freelancing for years. 

Currently, she is an independent editor and contributor to various publications, and she is working on her second novel. In 2018, she was awarded the Susan Tifft Fellowship for women in documentary and journalism by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and in 2023, she won a Soros Equality Fellowship to produce the anthology podcast, Happy Forgetting, which will release in late 2024. She’s a native of Caracas, Venezuela, currently based in Tucson, Arizona. 

 

Kamala Kelkar

Kamala is a dynamic storyteller and social justice champion who has a long track record of exposing wrongdoing and holding the powerful to account. Currently working as an independent editor and consultant for investigations and newsroom startups, she has served as the deputy editor of investigations at NPR, head of investigations for KPCC/LAist, co-deputy editor for Spotlight PA, and more. Her work has lifted wrongful disciplinary infractions on incarcerated people in Texas, recovered millions of dollars for Pennsylvania citizens, and provoked the State Department to rehouse Vietnam War refugees it had left hiding in Bangkok. 

Her most recent awards include two national Edward R. Murrows for podcasts that she helped edit at NPR: Taking Cover and White Lies Season Two, The Men on the Roof. She also has a specialized master’s from Columbia University in public health reporting and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from San Francisco State University.

 

Mago Torres

Mago is The Examination’s data editor, leading the data work behind its cross-border investigations. She has held leadership roles at the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP) and OpenNews and worked for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists on the Pandora Papers, FinCEN Files, Luanda Leaks and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Panama Papers.

She was a lead journalist on an investigation into clandestine graves in Mexico, which garnered numerous awards, including the 2019 Gabo Journalism Prize, which recognizes the best investigations in Latin America. Mago is originally from Mexico City and speaks Spanish.