ABOUT



Hi! My name is Fiona Kelliher, and I’m an award-winning freelance journalist in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I was previously an editor at VOD English—the hardest-hitting of Cambodia’s few independent newsrooms—until the government shut it down in February 2023. I focus on investigative and features reporting through a sociological lens.

My work has appeared in The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Nikkei, Al Jazeera, Voice of America, Rest of World and Coda Story, among others. I’ve covered intimidation and jailings of political dissidents challenging Cambodia’s ruling family, the extortion of indigenous and ethnic minorities in remote areas, and broken news about government plans for draconian laws and new technology. I’m interested in showing how people push and poke holes in the systems surrounding them, like monks using TikTok or a group of women waging weekly protests over the imprisonment of their husbands.

Other topics that interest me include intergenerational change and historical memory, which I explored in this longform piece about Khmer Rouge soldiers passing genocide myths to their grandchildren and this piece about how dictators’ online speech should be preserved.

I previously covered the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of race and labor for The Mercury News, a daily California newspaper. My 2021 investigation into a Covid-19 workplace outbreak law was reviewed by California's top workplace safety regulator and cited in a state Supreme Court case to stop local governments from hiding outbreak details. I also was part of a three-person team that investigated how California's COVID-19 policies failed Latino communities, producing a series that won a Society of Professional Journalists award and was a finalist for the national Victor K. McElheny Award. My work has earned other awards from the National Association of Real Estate Editors and the California Journalism Award for coverage of local government, explanatory reporting and in-depth reporting on separate occasions.

In 2021, I worked as the paper’s main wildfire field reporter and embedded with fire crews and communities at two of the biggest fires in California history, earning a Society of Professional Journalists award for best breaking news coverage.

I graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University in 2018 with a sociology B.A., where I received the school’s most outstanding undergraduate sociology student award.

Find me on Twitter at @fiona_kelliher and contact me at fi.kelliher@gmail.com. I’m always looking for new editors and tips.