Vanessa Maria Graber is an award-winning bilingual journalist, educator, and community organizer. She is a reporter/producer at the Philadelphia Hall Monitor and leads community engagement efforts. Vanessa Maria also works at the media and technology advocacy organization, Free Press, as the News Voices Director. In this role, she connects local communities and the newsrooms that serve them via public engagement, advocacy campaigns and collaborative projects.
She has over 20 years of experience working as a journalist at radio stations across the United States including WUSL, WJJZ, WDAD, WIUP, WCHL, WCOM, WPEB, and G-Town Radio. In 2016, she co-founded PhillyCAM’s community radio station, WPPM-LP FM, where she served as the station manager prior to joining Free Press. At WPPM she helped launch the Philadelphia Hall Monitor radio program and led news production at the station.
Vanessa Maria has a Master’s degree in Adult Education and Communications Technology from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania and was a Roy H. Park Doctoral Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She has conducted media research in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Costa Rica, Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Cuba and is a leading expert in community media, community engagement, local news and Latinx media.
