Farai Chideya is part of the foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression team, focusing on journalism. Her work supports the development and support of high-quality, principled reporting in the United States, with an emphasis on social justice, a diversity of voices, and press freedoms.
Before joining the foundation in 2017, Farai worked as a reporter, political and cultural analyst, and educator. Her journalistic beats have included pop culture, business, African-American life, and big data; and she has covered six presidential elections for print, television, radio, and digital outlets. She has covered organized white supremacist movements and mapped the intersections between racial extremism and mainstream politics and discourse. She has worked for numerous outlets, including Newsweek, CNN, ABC News, NPR (as host of News and Notes), and The Intercept.
During the 2016 election, Farai combined field reporting and data journalism in her work at FiveThirtyEight, with a focus on demographics, the American voter, and the cultural, racial, and socio-political rifts. After the election, she became a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, doing a mix of quantitative and qualitative research on race and gender diversity in the media. Earlier, she spent four years as a distinguished writer in residence at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
Farai is the author of five non-fiction works and one novel, most recently The Episodic Career: How to Thrive at Work in the Age of Disruption. Her first book, Don’t Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation About African Americans, went into eight printings and is frequently used as a university text.
