Deborah Barfield Berry

Deborah Barfield Berry, a 2023 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, is a former national correspondent for USA TODAY, where she focused on voting rights, civil rights and politics.

Berry, an award-winning journalist, has spent most of her journalism career in Washington, D.C., where she has covered Congress and national politics. She serves as president of the board for the Washington Press Club Foundation.

Her journalism career includes reporting for Gannett News Service, Newsday, Knight Ridder News Service, The Providence Journal, the Times Herald-Record and The Star Democrat.

Berry was part of a Newsday team that won a 1997 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800. She recently won three 2024 National Association of Black Journalists Salute to Excellence Awards and other NABJ awards over the years. She was also part of a team that won several awards for the USA TODAY project, "1619: Searching for Answers," and was the lead reporter and creator of "Seven Days of 1961," a multimedia civil rights project published in 2021. The civil rights project won several awards, including a 2022 NABJ award.

She is a lecturer at The George Washington University’s School of Media & Public Affairs, where she teaches a news writing and reporting course; a reporting coach at the University of Maryland; and a volunteer with the Washington Association of Black Journalists urban high school journalism workshop.
 

The native of Brooklyn, New York, is a graduate of the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, where in 2023 she was inducted into the Merrill College Hall of Fame.