Staff
Alfred I. duPont-Columbia and John Chancellor Awards
Abi Wright, Director
Abi Wright joined the school’s prizes and programs department in July 2008 as the director of the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards and the John Chancellor Award. Wright spent seven years working at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), where she worked most recently as communications director. She was responsible for CPJ’s overall communications strategy, publicizing issues, handling breaking news and producing the annual benefit dinner.
Wright spent July 2003 through July 2005 reporting on press abuses throughout Asia as CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. That job involved tracking and documenting regional trends, including the jailing of journalists in China and criminal defamation charges against journalists in Indonesia. She is a graduate of Barnard College, and an experienced television producer. Wright has worked for NBC News, ABC News and Fox News.
Read an interview with Wright about the duPont Awards.
Beth Canipe, Program Manager
Beth Canipe is the Program Manager for the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards and the John Chancellor Award. Prior to relocating to Brooklyn earlier this year, Beth served as the Resource Center Director for Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) at the Missouri School of Journalism for seven years where she coordinated the IRE Awards and the Philip Meyer Journalism Award. She also managed the Resource Center's collection of stories and tipsheets and provided research assistance to journalists. Beth was one of the founding volunteers of the True/False Film Fest, a documentary film festival held in Columbia, Mo. She also holds a master’s degree in library and information science from the University of Missouri.
Jacqueline Kook, Communications Associate
As the web editor and social media producer for the duPont-Columbia and Chancellor prizes, Jacqueline cultivates opportunities presented by online platforms and social networking. Jacqueline aims to maximize community engagement in emerging issues in broadcast and digital journalism using her background in public education, arts education and nonprofit media from the past five years. Prior to working with the Prizes and Programs Department at the Columbia Journalism School, Jacqueline co-directed the youth journalism and civic engagement program, Radio Rootz, where she led fundraising and communications efforts while teaching media literacy and digital media production to high school students. Jacqueline has a B.A. in Public Policy and Dance from Hamilton College and served as a Fulbright Teaching Fellow in South Korea. You can follow her on Twitter @jackiekook.
Monica Alba, Graduate Research Fellow
Monica is a masters student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism where she is studying documentary film. She is an honors graduate of the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism where she earned her degree in broadcast journalism with minors in international relations and cinematic arts. She is the co-founder and producer of the Social Issues Documentary Film Contest (SI DocFest), a high school film festival that requires students to produce short documentaries on social issues in the San Francisco Bay Area and awards $30,000 to students, schools and nonprofits annually.
She worked as a production coordinator for Chain Camera Pictures, working with Academy Award-nominated director Kirby Dick on the political documentary Outrage, which premiered at the TriBeCa Film Festival in 2009 and aired nationally on HBO. A native of San Jose, California, Monica speaks Spanish and French and has traveled widely. After graduate school, Monica hopes to make documentaries or work for a network that has long-form journalism outlets. She plans to focus on international and investigative reporting. You can follow her on Twitter @albamonica.
Julie is an M.S. broadcast student and fellow at Columbia’s Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Reporting. A recent graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, Percha served as an editor and reporter at The Pitt News, the university’s independent daily, earning a Columbia Gold Circle merit and contributing to its award-winning 2009 G-20 Summit coverage. Percha spent a summer traveling through the Gobi Desert to research how Mongolian nomads access news in the steppe. She also covered cultural events in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar while freelancing for The Mongol Messenger, one of Mongolia’s two English-language newspapers. Percha worked as a digital media intern with ABC News in Washington, D.C., and the D.C. politics beat reporter for The Hoya at Georgetown University. She was also an intern at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, peer tutor in the University Writing Center and, most recently, a 2011 Poynter College Fellow in St. Petersburg, Fla. An aspiring political reporter, Julie's aim is to cover Congress and the White House. Follow Julie on Twitter: @juliepercha.