Kimbriell Kelly is the Editor-in-Chief of Chicago Public Media, the nation’s largest local nonprofit newsroom, overseeing a team of more than 140 talented staff for the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ.
Kelly is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism executive and 25-year veteran investigative editor and reporter who has overseen multiple award-winning projects in some of the nation’s largest newsrooms, including The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.
Kelly is a former assistant managing editor and Washington bureau chief at the Los Angeles Times, where she oversaw coverage of politics and policy in Washington, D.C. Kelly led the bureau’s coverage of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, the 2020 Trump election challenge and, in her first year as bureau chief, launched three successful series, the “United States of California,” “Covering Kamala Harris” and “Extreme Heat.” Kelly edited the immigration coverage that led to the bureau’s first Pulitzer Prize in 17 years.
Prior to joining The Times, Kelly was an investigative reporter at the Washington Post, where she was part of the team that won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for the series “Fatal Force,” uncovering the FBI’s undercounting of fatal officer-involved shootings. She was a 2019 Pulitzer finalist for explanatory reporting for “Murder with Impunity,” a year-long examination of unsolved homicides across major cities in America. She is also the winner of the Polk Award for national reporting, Sigma Delta Chi for public service, among other awards, and was a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize and Selden Ring. Prior to moving to Washington, Kelly was a reporter, editor and publisher in metropolitan Chicago for almost 15 years at the Daily Herald and the Chicago Reporter, where her investigation into Countrywide Financial’s subprime mortgage lending led to the nation’s largest fair-lending settlement.
Kelly serves on the steering committee of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. She was twice named Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University, in 2020 and 2021, and has served as an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley, Roosevelt University and American University.