I’m an award-winning investigative journalist and feature writer based in California. I like to cover human rights, politics, historical memory, and how geographies real and constructed influence civic, political, and cultural life. My reporting and writing has been published in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, ELLE, Marie Claire, Noema Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The San Jose Mercury News, KQED, and Latino USA, among others.

I'm currently the senior immigration and labor reporter at El Tímpano, an outlet serving the Bay Area's Latino and Mayan immigrants. Previously, I spent more than a decade reporting on human rights across the U.S., Latin America, Africa, and Europe, investigating labor exploitation, gender-based violence, rising authoritarianism, and the surveillance state. In the summer of 2025, I reported on-the-ground in Ukraine, covering the future of technology in warfare and exploring how Jewish-Ukrainian identity is evolving amid Russia's full-scale invasion.

Before El Tímpano, I was a senior reporter with the international newsroom Coda Story covering the roots of global crises, from technology’s acceleration of authoritarianism to the use of historical revisionism to prop up nationalist political agendas. While in the newsroom, I went to Kenya to document the labor conditions for young content moderators working in big tech’s “African sweatshops,” drove hundreds of miles across the Southwest to investigate the surveillance ecosystem along the U.S.-Mexico border, traveled from Munich to Mississippi for a feature examining the dark spots of both countries’ historical reckonings, and hiked up and down the California coast with members of the climate grief movement for a long read about fires and magical thinking in the Golden State.

While at Coda, my feature comparing historical reckonings in Germany and the United States won the Online News Association’s 2022 Award for Explanatory Reporting. My 2023 investigation into the labor conditions of Kenya’s outsourced content moderation industry won the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award for best tech reporting and was shortlisted for the Fetisov Journalism Award for Contribution to Civil Rights.

Before Coda, I spent nearly a decade covering human rights across the U.S. and Latin America as an enterprise reporter for newsrooms in California, North Carolina, and Washington DC, and as a fellow with the International Women’s Media Foundation. During that time, I investigated the black market for abortion pills on the U.S.-Mexico border, embedded with Colombian sexual assault survivors who built their city from the ashes of the country’s civil war, journeyed from Honduras to North Carolina to retrace the journey of an asylum seeker fleeing gender-based violence, covered Argentina's feminist revolution, published exposés about the environmental, civil rights, and public health impacts of North Carolina’s commercial hog farming industry and was the first journalist to investigate the case of Ronnie Long, a Black man from North Carolina who was convicted of sexually assaulting a wealthy woman by an all-white jury in the 1970s and sentenced to life in prison. After spending over 40 years staunchly maintaining his innocence, Long was freed from prison in 2020, and awarded $25 million from the state of North Carolina in 2024 for his wrongful imprisonment.

I have been a journalism fellow with the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Foundation, the United Nations Foundation, the Delegation of the European Union to the United States,the International Women’s Media Foundation, and the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. My work has earned honors and recognition from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Online News Association, the Society of Environmental Journalists, the Philip D. Reed Award for Environmental Writing, SPJ NorCal, the San Francisco Press Club, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, and the Clay Felker Prize for Excellence in Longform Print Journalism.

I received my B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University and a Masters in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley. I report in Spanish and English and am certified in hostile environment and first aid training,

You can find me on Twitter @E_Hellerstein. I am always open to long-form freelance and staff opportunities, so please reach out if you are interested in collaborating.

If you’d like to work together, you can email erica@ericahellerstein.com or ehellerstein@protonmail.com