About
Hanna Ingber Win graduated as a Dean’s Scholar from USC’s Annenberg School for Communication in May 2008. She received her master’s degree in journalism and the Jack Langguth First Amendment Award. She is spending the summer covering the 2008 elections as part of a reporting fellowship by the Carnegie and Knight foundations called News21. The fellows are also blogging about the elections on the Huffington Post’s OffTheBus.
Hanna grew up in Goshen and Thompson Ridge, NY. Raised by lawyers, she quickly learned to question and debate everything. She became a (militant) vegetarian at age 11. During her middle school years, she spent her free time interrogating pharmaceutical companies, picketing rodeos and circuses, organizing community-wide vegan dinners, rallying her friends around the cause and driving her family crazy. Hanna no longer comments on what sits on others’ dinner plates, but she still loves animals and tries not to eat them.
As a teenager, Hanna moved on to challenging her small town to be more open about sex. She quickly became dubbed the Condom Girl. Hanna’s youth leadership skills were profiled in the New York Times, Ms. and Teen People. She gave speeches on youth leadership around the country and was interviewed on national television and radio shows including the Mitch Albom show and Fox News.
Hanna then attended Wesleyan University, where she majored in the College of Social Studies. Hanna started a column in the Wesleyan Argus called “A Little Bit Shady.” The column analyzed social issues on campus, from the dreaded walk-of-shame the morning after a sexual encounter, to eating disorders, to widespread cocaine use, to the emergence of online dating.
After she graduated in 2003, Hanna moved to Burma to work as the features editor and weekly columnist of the Myanmar Times newspaper for a year. The position offered her a portal into that elusive world and enabled her to later report news about Burma in NPR commentaries for Morning Edition and Day to Day and opinion pieces published in Washingtonpost.com, the Hartford Courant and the Huffington Post.
In 2004, Hanna moved to Chiang Mai, Thailand, where she acted as a stringer for the Irrawaddy, the leading publication in exile on Burma. Hanna wrote about migrant workers in Malaysia and Thailand.
Last summer Hanna worked as a general news intern at the Cape Times in Cape Town, South Africa. She wrote breaking news and feature articles on a wide range of topics, including refugees, crime, housing and animal welfare. Her pieces on police misconduct and child soldiers appeared as lead stories in the weekly review section.
As a journalism student, Hanna covered gangs in Los Angeles and laws affecting juvenile sex offenders. She was also a staff writer for an online publication called Pop+Politics, an intern for the weekly newspaper L.A CityBeat, an intern with KPCC’s Patt Morrison and a live blogger at the Knight Digital Media Center’s conference Covering Politics in Cyberspace. Hanna was recently named a 2008 NPR Kroc Finalist.
Hanna is married to Aung Moe Win, a graphic designer and aspiring animator. They live in Los Angeles and spend their free time cooking Burmese, Thai and Jewish cuisine, wandering around their neighborhood and taking pictures.
