Alumna in Action, October 2009: Eva Gilliam ’96

From Humanitarian to Environmental Journalism

As a freelance journalist, Eva Gilliam '96 covered cholera on the Zimbabwe/South African border for Reuters TV, witnessed more than 20,000 natives of Mozambique return home after xenophobic attacks in South Africa, and reported on African medical students in Cuba. Her stories have appeared on the Associated Press Television News and BBC/WPRI’s The World, among others. Gilliam also worked as a carpenter’s apprentice at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station a decade ago, where she helped build a science station. And, as a radio producer and information assistant with the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo earlier this decade, she helped construct a radio station.

Now based in Cape Town, South Africa, where she earned her master’s in film and television production from the University of Cape Town in 2006, Gilliam was recently awarded a Metcalf Fellowship for environmental journalism. The fellowship offered the opportunity to pursue a special course of study at Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography, and was the jumping point for me getting into environmental journalism,” says Gilliam. “It is something I feel very strongly about … [I] think that there is so much going on in Africa, positive and negative, around the environment that gets overshadowed by humanitarian crises. Yet these two things are so very intertwined and symbiotic. South Africa has amazing environmental stories to tell, and I am just starting down that road ….”

Born in Santa Barbara, California, Gilliam was raised in Austin, Texas, until she was 12, when she moved with her mother and sister to New York’s Greenwich Village. She graduated from the La Guardia High School of Performing Arts, where she was a jazz saxophonist. A cultural anthropology major at Barnard, she found Professor Lesley Sharp a key influence. “I think she was one of the most challenging professors I had … I really learned so much,” recalls Gilliam. “Her stories about field work and research in Madagascar definitely filled my mind with ideas for [pursuing] this area.” Gilliam’s undergraduate performance experience with improvisation may have also given her some of the confidence to tackle various challenges. “I use improv every single day—whether it’s to joke around with friends, conduct an interview, or deal with authorities in the field,” she says. “I love the unknown.”

—Merri Rosenberg ’78

Photos by Eric Miller (top) and Olivier Asselin (left)