Colleen Hagerty is an award-winning journalist telling narrative stories through video, print, and social mediums. She specializes in covering disasters, including deeply reported features and explainers diving into how policies and technologies impact mitigation, effects, and recovery. You can find her reporting across BBC News and PBS outputs, as well as in the New York Times, Wirecutter, Rolling Stone, Popular Science, National Geographic, The Guardian, New York Magazine, The Washington Post, and High Country News, among other outlets. She also has a newsletter about disasters, My World’s on Fire, which was shortlisted for a Covering Climate Now newsletter award.
Colleen’s reporting has been referenced in numerous media outlets, informed academic papers, and has been cited in a Congressional investigation. Her work has been supported by CUNY’s Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program, the Fuller Project, the International Women’s Media Foundation, the Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources, Media in Color, the Neil Peirce Foundation, and the ACOS Alliance. In 2017, Colleen was selected for the ICFJ’s Arthur F. Burns independent fellowship to report on the German federal elections. She was a 2023 Complicating the Narratives fellow with the Solutions Journalism Network reporting on prescribed fire, a 2024 Spruceton Inn artist-in-residence, and a 2025 Ragdale resident.
Colleen previously worked as a video journalist for BBC World, where she covered breaking news, politics, and created documentary features. She was also the the original host and a senior producer of the outlet’s social media newsmagazine, Cut Through the Noise. During the 2016 election, she helped launch NowThis Politics, amassing millions of views with her candidate interviews, policy analyses, and explainers aimed at first-time voters. While she has traveled extensively and lived throughout the US and internationally on assignments, part of her heart will always remain in New York City, where she got her start as a local news reporter covering Queens and Staten Island.