Katrina Media Fellowships

Multimedia Journalists

To create a fictional novel based on fact that follows the journeys of several people as they escape New Orleans and struggle to reunite with their families and start new lives. Maharidge and Williamson will employ a unique format that incorporates documentary photography with text and combines the reportorial techniques of nonfiction with narrative elements of fiction.

Maharidge is currently a visiting assistant professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Previously, he taught at Stanford University’s Department of Communication for ten years, and was a senior staff writer at The Sacramento Bee. He has over thirty years of journalism experience and has received numerous awards, including the Gustavus Myers Center award and Hunter College’s Social Justice Journalism Award. He has received grants from the Freedom Forum Professors’ Publishing Program and the Pope Foundation, a Lucius W. Nieman Fellowship from Harvard University, and residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo.

Williamson is a photojournalist for The Washington Post who has thirty years of experience coving a variety of global events, including the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the Philippine revolution, strife in the Middle East, the Gulf War, and conflicts in Africa and the Balkans. Prior to working at The Washington Post, Williamson worked at The Sacramento Bee and taught at Western Kentucky University. He has received numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the conflict in Yugoslavia, White House News Photographer’s Association Photographer of the Year, National Press Photographers Association’s “Newspaper Photographer of the Year,” and the Crystal Eagle Award, which recognizes photography that has had a documented effect on society.

New York, New York |