Nieman Fellows Honor Colleague Brent Renaud, Acclaimed Journalist Killed in Ukraine | Information

The Nieman Foundation’s 2022 cohort assembled a memorial in remembrance of Brent Renaud, acclaimed journalist and former Nieman fellow, in Harvard’s Science Centre Plaza Tuesday afternoon.

About 20 men and women attended the remembrance of Renaud, who was killed on March 13 by Russian forces in Irpin, a suburb of Kyiv, while filming Ukrainian refugees fleeing from the war. He was operating along with Juan Arredondo, a further Nieman fellow, who survived the attack with accidents.

An award-successful journalist and filmmaker, Renaud put in the 2018-2019 tutorial yr at Harvard via the Nieman Fellowship, an chance for journalists to attend courses and workshops although setting up relationships with other fellows. Renaud and his brother Craig filmed documentaries for a lot of media organizations, such as HBO and the New York Occasions, masking conflicts this kind of as the ISIS invasion of Iraq and Mexican cartel violence.

Nieman fellow ​​Pacinthe Mattar browse an overview of Renaud’s lifestyle, and the fellows took turns reading messages despatched in by Renaud’s friends from the 2019 Nieman course. At the gate of Harvard Yard, they laid down roses in entrance of a shrine for Renaud, which bundled a photograph and a description of his get the job done.

“As a class, we are honoring Brent’s get the job done by carrying out what drove him as a journalist: shining light-weight on the marginalized, the oppressed and the neglected,” the Nieman fellows from the 2022 course wrote in a handout distributed to attendees.

Jorge Caraballo, a Nieman fellow who served manage the celebration, explained the accumulating as “beautiful” in an interview next the party.

“​​We definitely truly feel that this fellowship is a local community, and a single of our members was killed,” Caraballo claimed. “It’s unpleasant for us, but it’s in particular distressing to those people who know him.”

“It was vital that we show solidarity not only with yet another Nieman but with yet another journalist who was killed when working,” explained Dave Mayers, another latest Nieman fellow, in an interview following the collecting.

Nieman Basis curator Ann Marie Lipinski mentioned the Nieman fellows and program directors had been “shaken” by the news of Renaud’s death.

“It’s gotten ever more risky for journalists in so numerous areas of the planet to do their function,” Lipinski stated in an interview. “They preferred to honor Brent, but also make this more substantial place about the value of journalism and the potential risks of practising it in this minute.”

Samantha Henry, Nieman Basis assistant director for programming, called Renaud’s dying “a distressing decline for the journalism family” and emphasized the legacy of his work.

“As other individuals who knew Brent have stated, he wouldn’t want the story to be about him,” Henry explained in an job interview. “He would want the tale to be about his Ukrainian colleagues, about the Russian journalists who are seeking to do impartial media beneath serious crackdown, about the Ukrainians on the frontlines attempting to report in their possess nation.”

—Staff author Vivi E. Lu can be attained at [email protected]. Abide by her on Twitter @vivielu_.