Erie’s Elissa Nadworny connects Erie to NPR and the world

By Heather Cass

Photos contributed by Elissa Nadworny and NPR

Elissa Nadworny interviewed families who shared memories, recipes and meals with her in Ukraine.

Elissa Nadworny, an Erie native and higher education correspondent for with a microphone,” she said. wanted to be a fi lmmaker, something she was inspired to pursue aft er helping proNational Public Radio (NPR), may seem to lead a glamorous life in media – residing in Washington, D.C., traveling across the country to do interviews, guest hosting popular shows like All Things Considered – but she said it’s more low-key than you might think.

“Most of the time it’s just me in sneakers The simplicity opens doors. “Radio is a magical medium because people will really let you in,” she said. “I’m able to be so much more intimate with the people I interview because it’s just a microphone and not a camera.” That said, Nadworny, 33, is comfortable with a video camera, too. She thought she duce a weekly show at Collegiate Academy’s student-produced KING-TV. Aft er high school, she went to Skidmore College where she earned a bachelor’s degree in documentary fi lm. “As a young person, I didn’t really know much about journalism,” she said. “I learned a lot more about it in college and decided to apply to graduate school.”

She attended Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, where as 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.

“It was my fi rst taste of true fi eld reporting,” she said. “It was so rewarding, and I remember thinking, I have to fi gure out how to make this my job.”

She took six months off school to do the Jordan experience and an internship at the Chicago Tribune.

“When you’re in school, you have much more access to grants, scholarships, and other opportunities,” Nadworny said. “A professor told me to use my student status as long as possible. It was great advice.”

Shortly aft er her graduation from Northwestern in 2014, she landed a job with Bloomberg News as a White House Correspondent when a mentor who was leaving the position passed her resume onto his editor.

“On my fi rst day, I remember sweating profusely from what felt like every pore of my body,” she said. “I mean, this is the White House! And so much of Bloomberg News reporting is about speed. So not only was the location intimidating, but the pace was, too. You were expected to be texting the news to your editor as soon as it was breaking.”

Nadworny worked for Bloomberg for a few years, with some of that time overlapping with her new gig at NPR. She started as an editor on the education desk at NPR before moving up to her current role as a correspondent reporting on higher education and college access.

“There’s something about higher ed that is fascinating to me,” she said. “It’s job force training, so it’s important to the country, but it’s also a broad beat that allows me to dabble in a lot of diff erent areas.”

Nadworny likes to dabble, not only in what stories to tell, but how to tell them. Her background and experience make her a versatile journalist for NPR where she is a multiplatform storyteller able to incorporate radio, print, photos and video in her pieces.

“It’s really fun to tell stories while playing in a variety of mediums,” she said.

For a perfect illustration of Nadworny’s skill and joy in her work, go to YouTube and fi nd her story “Whose Bones Are These? Investigating a Classroom Skeleton,” in which she tries to unravel the mystery of an educational skeleton at Collegiate Academy.

Elissa Nadworny, 33, suited up for her reporting duties for NPR while she was in Ukraine.

It’s a work of art.

“Ever since I found out the skeleton was real, I wanted to know who it was and how it got there,” she said.

Most of Nadworny’s stories are ideas that she has pitched. “It’s nice to have such creative freedom. I always have a ton of ideas, though sometimes you can be overwhelmed by your own creativity.”

That’s why, as of late, she been enjoying guest hosting a variety of NPR shows, including Weekend Edition and All Things Considered.

“It’s been a real treat because on those shows, there is a whole staff fi nding and pitching stories, so I just have to do the reporting,” she said. “And it’s nice to be back in the studio again.”

Nadworny has been working remotely since March of 2020, though not

Hear her stories stories

You can fi nd links to some of Nadworny’s work at www.elissanad.com. To listen to pieces that she mentions in this story, search these show titles online:

■ “Myers Chuck, AK, 99903”

■ “The Legacy of the

Mississippi Delta

Chinese”

■ “Through Performance,

Miss. Students Honor

Long Forgotten Heroes” ■ “Whose Bones are

These? Investigating a Classroom Skeleton” (YouTube) ■ “They’ve spent a lifetime in Kyiv. Not everyone can fl ee Russia’s war in

Ukraine”

Nadworny is also a host of NPRs Life Kit podcast, helping students navigate the college process.

exactly “at home.” She travels frequently for work. In the fall of 2020, she traveled to more than two dozen campuses to see how colleges were functioning during the pandemic.

“I’m most comfortable in a rental car and I get the best sleep in hotel beds,” she said. “I love being on the road.”

Among the most memorable places she’s visited: Mississippi. Yes, Mississippi.

“One of my favorite stories we have done is one about the Chinese American population in Mississippi. I kind of fell in love with the Mississippi delta,” she said. “We did another story there about a high school teacher who took his classes to a graveyard every year to choose a person to research.

They spent their whole year learning about this person’s life and then would do an oral history of that person at the graveyard in ents. Her father is Dr. Howard Nadworny, an infectious disease expert. Her mother, Dr. Jan Brydon, is a dermatologist.

In her free time, she enjoys reading and running. She’s signed up to do her third marathon this fall.

At just 33, her list of accomplishments is impressive. She is as surprised as anyone.

“A lot of my career has been a combination of talent and serendipity with thing just falling into place,” she said. “My goal was to be an NPR correspondent in my 40s and I’m already here, so I think I need to dream a little bigger now.”

Shortly aft er fi nishing the interview for this story, Nadworny certainly went big.

She went to Ukraine for a month to cover the war for NPR. At press time, she had returned

“I’m most comfortable in a rental car and I get the best sleep in hotel beds … I love being on the road.”

costume.” (See sidebar for a list of some of her favorite work.)

Wherever she travels, she thinks of her hometown. “I love Erie,” she said. “It’s the greatest place to live and the quality of life is so good there. You have it all with four seasons. You can go sailing or cross-country skiing or go to the beach. I have always loved Erie but traveling has solidifi ed my love for it.”

Nadworny returns to Erie whenever she gets the opportunity and to visit her parsafely back in the states and off ered a few refl ections on her time in Ukraine.

“Covering war seems diff erent from covering education, but there is a lot that is translatable. Education is a beat that encompasses so much of life,” she said. “At the core of most of my stories are people navigating the world they fi nd themselves in, and that’s really the same wherever you point your microphone.”

She said one of the biggest challenges of reporting in Ukraine was the scope of the

Traveling thoughout the world to cover stories, Erie native Elissa Nadworny said her favorite place to visit is home in Erie. Covering a variety of topics for NPR, Elissa Nadworny enjoys creating her own stories and running with ideas that others suggest.

job itself: “I had to do stories about the broad geopolitical and strategic issues, such as sanctions and troop movements, and I had to do stories about the human impact of war,” she said. “We worked many, many hours a day: setting up interviews, making calls, arranging drivers and fixers, then doing the interview and getting the tap, then coming back and writing and going through the tape and doing the production. Throw in the nightly air raid sirens and we got very little sleep.”

Their movements in the country were fraught as well: “With shelling and missile attacks, you didn’t always know what areas were safe and which were not,” she said. “Every story was a conversation with our security team on the ground and back at NPR headquarters in D.C.”

Ukraine was a fascinating country with an interesting history and she was surprised at how modern and tech savvy they were. “On public transport, metro or tram, you could pay using your smartphone and, even during war, the postal service was delivering and quite efficient, too!”

On social media, she shared what an emotional experience it was. She interviewed families, people who escaped the horror and those who stayed. She wrote, ”When you’re reporting all this, it takes a toll. An editor told me covering this, you’ll never unsee these things, never unfeel these emotions.”

To read more about her experience and Ukraine and get a link to the stories Nadworny worked on, visit: https://twitter.com/ ElissaNadworny/status/1517471309562789888?s=20&t=gcmuELxEBFGxtgGtiDsG0Q LEL Most of the time, Nadworny says, “it’s just me in sneakers with a microphone.”

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