Kristina Vera-Phillips
Kristina Vera-Phillips is a media scholar and Emmy Award-winning journalist who investigates how the stories we read, hear, and watch reflect identity, representation, and power in news media and popular culture.
Her scholarship explores how journalists navigate newsroom routines, editorial practices and questions of fairness through the lens of their own identities and community ties. Her dissertation draws on in-depth interviews with BIPOC journalists to better understand how they define and negotiate fairness in American broadcast newsrooms.
Vera-Phillips has conducted qualitative research using interviews and photovoice methods to study how Asian immigrants perceive news content and misinformation, and how symbols like the American flag evoke belonging and division among young adults in Arizona. She also maintains a distinct research agenda in popular culture, grounded in postcolonial and critical media studies. Her research examined the characters, speeches and communities represented in Star Wars: Andor, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Grey’s Anatomy.
Her work has been published in American Behavioral Scientist, Journalism Practice and the Journal of Popular Culture.
She brings more than 14 years of newsroom experience into the classroom, having produced daily newscasts and special projects in the Sacramento, San Francisco and San Diego markets. Her academic teaching spans undergraduate and graduate courses in news producing, multimedia storytelling, journalism ethics and diversity.
Vera-Phillips earned her Ph.D. in journalism and mass communication from Arizona State University.
She currently serves as Communication Chair for the Commission on Graduate Education and as Professional Freedom and Responsibility (PF&R) Chair for the Broadcast and Mobile Journalism Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). She is a former national board member of the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) and mentors emerging journalists through AAJA Voices, NPR’s Next Generation Radio, and PBS NewsHour’s Student Reporting Labs.
