Immigrant. Mother. Storyteller. Living Donor.

That’s me in a nutshell, but let’s get into the details. My lived experience as an Iranian immigrant and a single mother have fostered a drive and passion for storytelling — across any platform. My decision last year to donate a kidney to a colleague I barely knew nearly 900 miles away cemented my belief that empathy and communication set my life’s compass.

Let’s rewind: More than 20 years ago, I marched between the Jackson Street offices of The Red & Black and the basement-level classrooms at Grady College, several times a day, five days a week with a singular mission: learn how to tell stories with impact. Whether it was working the phones into the night to scoop the Banner-Herald or enduring a sweat-inducing review of my latest article by the late Professor Conrad Fink, my experience as an undergraduate journalism student drove my passion for reporting on the most important stories of the day.

That passion to use journalistic methods to share compelling stories is what pushed me through the dank, overcrowded prisons of Alabama as a correspondent for AP. It’s how I endured bouncing along a surface mine in eastern Kentucky, while eight-months pregnant, to get a story on the battle between coal miners and alternative energy advocates. It drove my persistence in exposing the abuses at a mental health hospital caring for the community’s most vulnerable, even when local officials would look away.

That laser-focused passion for storytelling stoked my deep interest in exploring media beyond my traditional print background – diving into broadcast, audio, and digital platforms at CNN for the past 15 years. Through various roles at CNN – from an editorial watchdog to managing multi-platform investigative projects – I’ve had the privilege of learning about and working on the ways to best tell high-impact stories that engage and move the audience. In fact, I was so curious about our approach to digital storytelling through interactive media, that I attended a coding boot camp at night to better communicate with and support my colleagues in this space. 

This is how I have evolved in my pursuit: I don’t want to just tell stories. I want to deliver them in the most exciting and engaging ways possible. 

I can’t think of a better way of learning how to do this than to return to Grady College as a candidate in the Emerging Media graduate program. At this moment, I am learning a wide range of skills spanning the technical and creative – all of which would be hugely beneficial to my professional goals of taking digital storytelling to the next level at CNN and beyond.

I have already seen great success in taking new approaches to interactive digital media in some of the projects I’ve managed at CNN over the past three years – from following the journeys of Capitol rioters through an immersive digital experience to capturing the horrors of the biomass industry in the South with innovative approaches to drone footage. The risks I’ve taken in these spaces boosted our audience engagement – and deepened my curiosity.

My goal is to go beyond the editorial and tap into the expertise of the New Media faculty and other students in this program. As a journalist, having a stronger understanding of how digital innovation and storytelling intersect is crucial to my growth and stands to ensure the most important stories of the day reach our audiences with the greatest reach and impact possible.