Elissa Nadworny
Correspondent, Higher Education
Elissa Nadworny is an NPR Correspondent, covering higher education.
In 2022 she spent several months in Ukraine covering the war with Russia, with a special focus on the effect of war on children and families.
She also guest hosts NPR shows such as All Things Considered and Weekend Edition.
In 2020 she traveled to dozens of college campuses to document what it was like to reopen during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. Her work has won several awards including a 2018 James Beard Award for a story about the Chinese-American population in the Mississippi Delta, a 2017 Edward R. Murrow Award for excellence in innovation and a 2020 Gracie Award for a story about student parents in college,
Some favorite story experiences include embedding with a class of college students getting their degrees from inside a state prison, crawling in the sewers below a college campus to test wastewater for the coronavirus and sitting with the elderly living along the front lines in Ukraine's east. In 2018, she went on an epic search for the history behind her own high school's 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.
