Victoria Valenzuela is an independent journalist in Los Angeles. Last fall, she graduated from the University of Southern California with her master’s degree in specialized journalism with a concentration in social justice and investigations. She has been published in The Guardian, BuzzFeed News, LA Public Press, Bolts Magazine, LAist, The Appeal, and more. She has covered topics of forced prison labor, forced sterilizations of women incarcerated in California, concerns from incarcerated firefighters’ families, barriers to prison visitation, the criminalization of domestic violence survivors, issues in solitary confinement and more.
She is a two-time finalist for the Southern California Journalism Awards, most recently in the “investigative reporting – government related” category last summer for her reporting on California’s prison-to-deportation pipeline. In the past, she has interned for The Marshall Project and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and she was also an emerging reporter fellow with ProPublica.