Jacqui Banaszynski is an award-winning reporter and editor who now coaches, teaches and edits journalists around the world. She taught for 17 years at the Missouri School of Journalism, and now is as a Knight Chair professor emerita. She holds a faculty fellow position at the world-renowned Poynter Institute, and is the current editor of Nieman Storyboard, a site devoted to exploring the art and craft of storytelling.

Banaszynski’s reporting career took her to all seven continents, including reporting trips to Antarctica. She has written about corruption and crime, beauty pageants and popes, AIDS and the Olympics, dogsled expeditions and refugee camps, labor strikes and political strife, traffic fatalities and family tragedies. While a reporter at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, she won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for an intimate series on a gay farm couple dying of AIDS, and was a finalist for the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for her eyewitness account of the famine crisis in sub-Saharan Africa. In 1991, she traveled with the Kurdish refugees who fled Iraq after the first Gulf War. She won the Associated Press Sports Editors’ deadline award for coverage of Greco-Roman wrestling at the 1988 Olympics. 

Projects she has edited have won ASNE Best Newspaper Writing, Ernie Pyle Human Interest Writing and national business, social issues and investigative prizes. Student projects she directed were frequent winners of the Hearst Award, considered the Pulitzers of college journalism. In 2008, she was named to the Society of Features Journalists Hall of Fame.