David Welna, NPR Biography
Correspondent, Capitol Hill, Washington Desk
David Welna became NPR's congressional correspondent during the final days of the Clinton administration. He had earlier covered campaigns for the November 2000 election and the post-election vote count battle in Florida. Many of the issues Welna follows in both the House and the Senate tie in with reporting he's done in the U.S. and abroad.
In mid-1998, after 15 years of reporting for NPR from overseas, David Welna returned to the U.S. to report from NPR's Chicago bureau. During his posting in Chicago, he brought listeners extensive coverage on a variety of changes in Midwestern agriculture that are putting pressures on small farmers, on how foreign conflicts and economic crises affect people in the heartland, and on efforts in the region to improve public education. He drew on his background covering Latin America to cover the saga of Elian Gonzalez both in Miami and Cuba.
Welna first filed stories for NPR as a freelancer in 1982, based in Buenos Aires. He covered South and Central America, and in 1995 became the chief of NPR's Mexico bureau. He also has reported for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, The Financial Times, and The Times of London. In addition, his photography has appeared in Esquire, The New York Times, Paris Review, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
While reporting from abroad, Welna covered a wide range of stories in Latin America. In 1985 he covered the wrenching trial of Argentina's former military leaders who presided over the disappearance of tens of thousands of suspected dissidents. In Brazil, he visited a town in Sao Paulo state called Americana where former slaveholders from America relocated after the Civil War. Welna also reported on the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the mass exodus of Cubans who fled the island on rafts in 1994, the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, and the U.S. intervention in Haiti and the restoration to power of Jean Bertrand Aristide to Haiti's presidency.
In 1995 he was awarded an Overseas Press Club award for his coverage of Haiti; that year he was also chosen by the Latin American Studies Association to receive their annual award for distinguished coverage of Latin America. In 1997 he was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University. In 2002, Welna was elected by his colleagues to a two-year term as a member of the Executive Committee of the Congressional Radio-Television Correspondents' Galleries.
A native of Minnesota, Welna graduated magna cum laude from Carleton College in Northfield, MN, with a BA and distinction in Latin American Studies. He speaks fluent Spanish, French, and Portuguese, and is married to the author Kathleen Wheaton. They have two sons.
