Vanessa A. Alvarez

Vanessa Alessandra Alvarez began her career as a junior beat reporter at the Miami Herald in 2008 before jumping to the assignment desk two and a half years later at WTVJ/NBC Miami, the local station she grew up watching. In 2012, Alvarez moved to Washington, D.C. to begin work in documentaries. She was one of 15 selected that year to George Washington University’s prestigious Institute of Documentary & Film. While there, Alvarez and a team of six wrote, shot and edited a short film about the subculture of Anime fans in the United States. Shortly after the program ended, Alvarez moved to New York City for a News Fellowship at NBC News, where she joined the teams at Dateline NBC, Rock Center with Brian Williams and NBCLatino.com.

Alvarez covered the Colorado Theater shooting, Occupy Wall Street, fried food mania at the Texas State Fair in Dallas, Texas; the March for Immigration Reform on April 10, 2013 in Washington, D.C., and reaction to the post-Chavez Venezuelan Presidential Elections that same year. Upon the fellowship’s end, she continued contributing education, health and immigration stories for NBC Latino. Her work also appeared on TODAY.com and MSNBC.com.

In June 2014, Alvarez graduated with a master's degree from Columbia Journalism School, where she focused on video storytelling and production - reporting stories for a digital audience. During this time, Alvarez served as president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’s student chapter. As a student in Prof. Samuel Freedman’s bookwriting seminar, she completed a book proposal about the only Mexican-American to be recognized by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as both a World War II Veteran and Holocaust survivor. The Global News Internship program at the Associated Press in New York City lead to her work appearing in the The New York Times, The Houston Chronicle, The Miami Herald, The San Antonio Express-News, and Newsday.

She has a deep love for news, travel, food and fitness.