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 imagined shape politics and culture. At the moment, I’m most interested in essays about a nation or place’s collective psychology — like my reported memoir about climate grief in California, or my feature comparing historical reckonings in Germany and the United States, which won the Online News Association’s 2022 Award for Explanatory Reporting.

I have reported on the ground across the U.S. as well as in Europe, Latin America, and Africa. My writing has been published in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, ELLE, Marie Claire, The Guardian, Noema Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The San Jose Mercury News, among others.

From 2020-2023, 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 for an investigation into the growing 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.

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 been recognized by the Philip D. Reed Award for Environmental Writing, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Society of Environmental Journalists, the Online News Association, 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. If you’d like to collaborate, you can email erica@ericahellerstein.com or contact me securely at ericahellerstein@protonmail.com.