MISSION STATEMENT:

NAHJ Investigative & Data Journalism Task Force was created in 2021 to be a driving force to reverse in measurable ways the history of racist and discriminatory hiring in the U.S. media and help to diversify investigative teams and increase the presence of Latinos — from team leaders, to reporters and data teams — in newsrooms across the country. Our task force functions with the belief that diversity is meaningless without power, equity, and justice.

Investigative & Data Journalism Task Members

Marina Villeneuve

Marina Villeneuve is an investigative reporter for The Hechinger Report. She worked for over six years as a statehouse reporter for The Associated Press covering New York and Maine, where she chronicled the administrations of former Govs. Andrew Cuomo and Paul LePage.  She has also worked as a legal reporter covering Trump's legal battles for Salon, and as an investigative producer at a local Boston television station leading investigations into abuse at public schools and nursing home inspections. She has also covered Colombian peace negotiations for the Washington Post, Congress for the L.A. Times, and northern New Jersey municipalities for The (Bergen) Record. She is a board member of Investigative Reporters and Editors and the New England chapter of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. She has contributed reporting to investigations that have won recognition from the Goldsmith Awards and the Silurians Press Club. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College, where she majored in government with a focus on constitutional law. She has also earned a certificate in data journalism from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. 

Marina Villeneuve Circle

Marina Villeneuve

Co-Chair

Perla Trevizo

Perla Trevizo is a reporter with the ProPublica-Texas Tribune Investigative Initiative. Throughout her 20 years in journalism, she has focused on politics, immigration, and the environment. She began her career in her hometown of El Paso, Texas and worked for five newspapers across three states before joining ProPublica in 2020.

Perla Trevizo Circle

Perla Trevizo

Co-Chair

Morelys Urbano

Morelys Urbano was born in the Dominican Republic, and was partially raised in La Coruna, Spain, where she studied for three years. She migrated to reunite with her mother in the U.S. in 2017. As the daughter of an immigrant single mom, Morelys developed a sense of resilience through her immigrant identity that manifested in her professional career as a journalist, her artistry as a poet and author, and her consistency as an advocate and activist.  

She is currently pursuing studies in Multimedia Journalism and a minor in Latin American & Caribbean Studies at Morgan State University, a Maryland HBCU. Upon completing her undergraduate studies, Morelys hopes to obtain a PhD in cultural or Hispanic studies. 

From a young age, Morelys has utilized her creativity as a tool for social justice. This dedication recently culminated in the eagerly anticipated release of her debut book, “A Sangre Fria,” a bilingual poetry anthology resonating with themes of resilience, Blackness, and womanhood, and her homonymous musical poetry album. Beyond her literary achievements, she made history as the first undocumented Afro-Latina to establish an organization dedicated to advocating for immigrant rights at an HBCU. 

Morelys Urbano Circle

Morelys Urbano

Clavel Rangel

Clavel Rangel Jiménez is a journalist with 15 years of experience covering labor unions, migration, human rights, climate change, corruption, and extractive industries in Venezuela and across the Americas. She is a co-founder of the Venezuelan Amazon Journalists Network, an initiative dedicated to fostering training, knowledge exchange, and collaboration among journalists.

A 2024 Fellow with Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), Clavel is based in Miami, and her work has been featured in Correo del Caroní, Armando.info, The Guardian, Univision, and El Tiempo Latino. Her current research explores the resettlement and integration of Venezuelan migrants in the U.S., with a particular focus on the mental health challenges faced by asylum-seeking families and children in schools. She is developing a long-term project to document these dynamics.

Clavel Rangel Circle

Clavel Rangel

Mc Nelly Torres

Co-chair

Yvette Cabrera

Co-chair

Mc Nelly Torres is an award-winning investigative journalist and editor at the Center for Public Integrity where she leads an award-winning team investigating inequality. Previously, Torres worked as an investigative producer for NBC6 in Miami and co-founded FCIR.org. Torres is a product of newspapers including the Sun-Sentinel and the San Antonio Express-News. Torres was the first Latina to be elected to the boards of directors of the Investigative Reporters and Editors and the Florida Society of News Editors. She has trained thousands of journalists in investigative techniques and data journalism in the U.S. and Latin America. Torres has earned over two dozen awards throughout her career, including an Emmy for her work at NBC, an Edward R. Murrow Award, and several awards from organizations such as the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Education Writers Association and the Society of Professional Journalists, among others. She was inducted in NAHJ’s Hall of Fame in 2018. She’s currently serving on the board of directors of the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting and NAHJ. Torres was a recipient of the Gwen Ifill Award  in 2022. 

Cortez began his career as a reporting stringer for the LA Times and LA Daily News out of high school. During his college years, he participated in photography internships ranging from Spanish publications in Dallas and Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, a mid-size paper in West Texas and The Associated Press in Chicago.

Yvette is a senior reporter at the Center for Public Integrity covering inequality in economic and social well-being. Most recently she worked as an environmental justice reporter for Grist & HuffPost, and as an investigative reporter for ThinkProgress in Washington D.C. She reports at the intersection of justice and equity, examining the impact of systemic disparities, such as environmental pollution and contamination, on marginalized communities throughout the country. She has reported extensively on the pervasiveness of toxic lead contamination across the country, including an investigation on the legacy of industrial lead pollution in urban residential neighborhoods as a 2019 McGraw Center for Business Journalism fellow, and a five-part investigative series where she showed through soil testing how lead exposure is still harming children in complex ways. In 2022, she was selected as a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center practitioner to create a journalist’s guide for reporting on soil lead contamination. She currently serves as president for the National Association of Hispanic Journalists; and for two decades served as a board member of CCNMA: Latino Journalists of California, the oldest regional organization of journalists of color in the country.

HOW TO JOIN:

Want to get involved and engage with journalists that share your similar interest? Here’s how to get started:

Log into the NAHJ member portal. Not a member? Join/Renew today.
Under member home, click on my profile.
Select the edit profile button and choose from the following options:

  • Afro-Latino Task Force
  • Business Task Force
  • Investigative & Data Task Force
  • LGBTQIA+ Task Force
  • Meteorology & Climate Task Force
  • Sports Task Force
  • Visual Task Force

Start typing and press enter to search

Scroll to Top