Meet SEJ member Alessandra Bergamin! Alessandra is an Australian freelance journalist based in Los Angeles, whose work focuses on environmental violence and human rights around the world. She’s written for The Baffler, In These Times, Harper’s Magazine, National Geographic, Alta Journal, TheNewYorker.com, The Lily and DAME Magazine, among others. With support from The Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting, she recently investigated how U.S. security assistance fuels violence against environmental defenders around the world. She was a 2022 Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Transatlantic Media Fellow, a 2020 IJNR Environmental Justice Reporting Award grantee and a 2019 UC Berkeley Food and Farming fellow. In 2022, she was honored as a Distinguished Journalist by the Society of Professional Journalists, Los Angeles in the newspaper/print (smaller circulation) category. Her work has also been shortlisted for the True Story Award, a global journalism prize, and was included in the PM Press anthology, “Nourishing Resistance: Stories of Food, Protest, and Mutual Aid.”

When asked how SEJ membership has made her job easier, Alessandra said, "I was lucky enough to attend an SEJ conference as a grad student and the experience helped set the tone for my own post-college career. Now, as a freelancer with fewer institutional resources available, I’ve found SEJ’s initiatives [2] and publications [3] invaluable. Most recently, I undertook a complicated investigation and relied on SEJ’s extensive Freedom of Information resources [4]." Join us — apply for SEJ membership [5].

See some of Alessandra's work:

• "Meet The Women Survivors of the World’s Worst Industrial Disaster [6]," Atmos, March 11, 2025
• "Lessons on Fighting for the Climate While Living Under Authoritarianism [7]," Waging Nonviolence, October 21, 2024
• "The Death Squads Hunting Environmental Defenders [8]," In These Times, July 10, 2024
• "A Pipeline Brings Gas and Revolt to Southern Italy [9]," In These Times, February 10, 2023
• "Bitter Fruit [10]," The Baffler, May 2022

Find Alessandra:

Instagram:     @_alessandrabergamin [11]
Bluesky:         @alessandrabergamin.bsky.social [12]

 

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