Valeriya Kipnis is an immigrant writer, reporter, and Emmy-award winning documentary producer. Currently, she makes stories at This American Life. She recently returned from a six-month reporting trip in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Karakalpakstan, where she was as an Above The Fray fellow for NPR.  

Before working in radio, Kipnis spent a year on a Fulbright to Ukraine...in Warsaw, Poland. There, she started working on a documentary project with displaced children from Ukraine, centered on memory and place. She's currently seeking funding for it. 

Before that, she was a producer and on-camera reporter for VICE News, a documentary-style news show, where she reported on: reproductive rights, climate change, and the former Soviet Union. Occasionally, she would host live shows about space or talks to pigs in Vegas. She previously worked at or contributed to: Coda Story, The Moscow Times, and NBC. 
 
She attended New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Studies, where she studied the intersection of Post-Soviet History, Comparative Literature, and Political Theory. After graduating, she received the Dean's Award and traveled to Russia and Ukraine to "find herself." She did not, of course, do that. But she did conduct interviews with badass female dissidents. 
 
In 2021, she received her MFA in Non-Fiction Writing from The New School. There, she was awarded the 2021 Bette Howland Nonfiction Prize by judge Emily Bernard. 
 
She likes to write essays and narrative non-fiction about immigrants, the former Soviet Union, Brooklyn, and language. Her literary work debuted in A Public Space in July of 2021. 

Her given name is Valeriya, but you can call her Lera, Valerie or Val.