Sandhya Dirks
Reporter/ProducerSandhya got her start as a reporting fellow at KALW, working on award winning radio documentaries about crime and justice and education in Oakland. She reported on the 2012 presidential election in Iowa, for Iowa Public Radio, where she also covered diversity and mental health issues.
As a politics reporter in San Diego at KPBS, she helped lead an investigation into sexual harassment charges against the mayor that resulted in his resignation. For that reporting she was named, along with her team, San Diego's Journalist of the Year by the local Society of Professional Journalists. Sandhya also reports for NPR, Latino USA, and PRI's The World.
She returned to KALW to continue her work on criminal justice, poverty, and the changing community of the Bay Area.
Sandhya studied at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, where her masters project, an investigative documentary film about international adoption, received the Pasty Pulitzer Fellowship.
She lives in Oakland with her two cats.
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There are a thousand hidden histories in the Bay Area – stories in the cement, just beneath the surface of our routes to work or school or play. There are…
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Happy Halloween! Walking around today, you might hear a lot of recorded, ghoulish screaming. Today it's supposed to be all in fun. But there are some…
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California has long been a land of possibility. From the Gold Rush to the promise of fertile farmland, people from all over the world have flocked here…
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All week long, we've been playing this sound, and asking you to guess what exactly it is and where exactly in the Bay Area we recorded it.This auditory…
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Journalist Cyrus Farivar knows a thing or two about surveillance. While reporting for Ars Technica, Farivar got the entire license plate reader dataset…
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In the auditorium of Willard Middle School, about 300 people have gathered, many of them sitting on those rickety school bucket chairs, the ones that make…
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Awards season is behind us, with top honors for acting handed out at the Golden Globes and Oscars. But after all the pomp and circumstance is over and the…
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The current unrest after police shootings of unarmed black men means the battle for racial justice is far from over. Jeff Chang is a journalist, cultural…
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Mayor Jean Quan is the incumbent in the race, and she's been making the case for Oakland to give her a second term. But in the past four years, her…
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The dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has become something of a superstar in America. He is known for his provocative artwork, his outspoken critique of…