2021 Deadline Club Scholarships Winners

Deadline Club scholarships highlight the work of students from Newmark, Columbia, Fordham and St. Thomas universities.

View the full scholarships presentation in the video below.

The Deadline Club, the New York City chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, is pleased to announce five winners in its 2021 scholarship competition.

The five winners have demonstrated an extraordinary dedication to storytelling in underrepresented communities and uphold the standards of truth and fairness. Each will receive $2,500 acknowledging their journalistic accomplishments.

Undergraduate Winners

Eliot Schiaparelli is graduating from Fordham University this spring where she is the news manager at WFUV public radio. Her journalistic work for the station focuses on Bronx-based non-profits and issues. She also does daily newscasts and works editing and training younger students. She won a Gracie Award for her multimedia series about changemakers in the Bronx as well as awards from the Public Media Journalists Association. She’ll attend Columbia University’s School of Journalism in the fall.

Kathryn Cambrea is majoring in communication arts with a concentration in journalism and minoring in creative writing at St. Thomas Aquinas College. She is the editor-in-chief of her school newspaper, The Thoma, and served as the editor-in-chief of her high school newspaper as well. As an intern at WRCR AM 1700, she hosted and developed content.

Graduate Winners

Janelle Retka, a reporter and illustrator originally from Seattle, is transitioning into a career in science reporting at the Columbia University Science Journalism M.A.  She has reported on an array of topics from education to politics, health care, business and environment in rural Washington state and Southeast Asia, where she was based in Cambodia for a handful of years.

Banjo Damilola is an investigative journalist from Nigeria and a graduate student at the Columbia Journalism School. Damilola’s work on health, human rights, education and social justice have been published across major news platforms in Nigeria. The Nigeria Investigative Journalist of the year 2020 (Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Reporting), she was the only Nigerian investigative journalist in a global investigation by openDemocracy.

Radhamely De Leon is a Bronx-based culture writer and video journalist currently pursuing a Master’s degree at the Craig Newmark School of Journalism, with a concentration in arts and culture. She’s previously worked with The New York Times Magazine and “Democracy Now!” Her work has also been featured in NBC News and New York Family. Most recently, De Leon has been reporting on the pandemic’s impact on the South Bronx and its local arts community for the Mott Haven Herald and the Hunts Point Express. She will be interning at Vice this summer, before graduating in the fall.

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