Biography
Marisa Mazria Katz is a journalist and radio reporter of Syrian descent. She has contributed to numerous publications, including The New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Vogue, NPR, Marketplace, Time and The New York Review of Books.
Past editorial projects have been awarded major grants from the Keith Haring Foundation, the Trust for Mutual Understanding and the Andy Warhol Foundation. In 2009 she received funding from the US State Department for a four-year program that taught journalism to teenagers from a marginalized community in Casablanca, Morocco. In 2018 Mazria Katz served as one of the first Kickstarter Fellows, and later that year she founded the Craig Newmark Philanthropies–funded program the Eyebeam Center for the Future of Journalism. The program—whose central mission is to support artists seeking to make work for major media publications like The New Yorker, The Guardian, Wired and The Atlantic—has helped facilitate pieces that have gone on to win a Pulitzer Prize, Emmy, New York Press Club award, and a SXSW Film Festival 2021 Special Jury Recognition for Immersive Journalism.
Mazria Katz was the founding editor of Creative Time Reports. The program’s key goal was to publish artists’ unflinching perspectives on the most challenging issues of our times. With Creative Time Reports, artists were correspondents and brought their own unique spin to current events. Under her tenure, the website co-published Creative Time Reports content with The Guardian, Al Jazeera America, Foreign Policy, The New Yorker, Slate, Salon, The Intercept and many more. In 2019, she published with Paper Chase Press and Creative Time, Artists on the News, a selection of work from Creative Time Reports.
In 2023, Mazria Katz co-founded the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting, a first-of-its-kind initiative that generates meaningful collaboration between journalists and artists in order to ensure powerful public interest stories have more impact and greater emotional resonance.
Mazria Katz currently teaches the course "Artists Report: Making the News" at the Rhode Island School of Design.