Nadya Kelly joined WUWM as the station’s newest Eric Von Broadcast Fellow in September 2023. Before joining the WUWM team, she studied art journalism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and produced a podcast where she reported on Chicago’s underground ballroom scene.
She spoke with Lake Effect production assistant Xcaret Nuñez about the Eric Von Fellowship and why she’s excited to join the station.
The following are excerpts from that interview, some portions edited, paraphrased or consolidated for clarity.
Xcaret: Tell us a little bit about the work you'll be doing here at the station.
Nadya: If I can talk about the fellowship itself, it was started to honor Eric Von, who was a very respected journalist and commentator in radio and was really important, particularly to the Black community in Milwaukee. With all that in mind, I'll be working as a reporter with the news team here at WUWM to provide thoughtful and engaging news for the greater Milwaukee community, and I'm here to also cultivate my own journalistic interests. I'm really interested in reporting on issues and news for people of color.
Xcaret: What made you want to apply for the fellowship?
Nadya: I think it was really very simple for me. I really wanted an opportunity to work with sound so I could incorporate sound more into the types of stories that I was writing. I've always considered myself to be a writer, but once I started working with audio for the first time, it really opened up this world of possibilities for me about how sound can really help humanize the types of stories that I was writing about and the people that I was writing about and reporting on. As a Black woman, audio journalism has given me the chance to see the issues that I'm really concerned with be discussed and analyzed with the type of thoughtfulness that I think these issues deserve to be talked about with, so I wanted an opportunity where I could contribute to that as well.
Xcaret: Absolutely, I have a similar experience about why I decided to go into radio too, as a woman of color. You touched on a little bit about what you've been working on in the past. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Nadya: Right before I joined WUWM, I was in Chicago. I was going to grad school, and I studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. My program was Art Journalism. I was doing a lot of profiles, reviews, essays about a lot of artists, and actually as part of my thesis for that program, I produced the pilot episode of a podcast series where I reported on Chicago's ballroom scene, which is if you don't know what ballroom is, it's an underground competition scene where Black and brown queer people perform in all different types of categories, like drag, fashion and dance. In addition to that, I was doing a lot of freelancing. I wrote a lot of reviews about local arts galleries in Chicago. I went to a lot of different concerts, writing about different types of musicians, and I started a publication with a few of my colleagues called As Art, and we wrote a bunch of short form essays that looked at the things around us and phenomena around us through an arts lens.
Xcaret: We've made it officially a week into working at WUWM. How's it going so far? What's something you're excited to work on? What's happening?
Nadya: I'm excited about so many things. I'm excited to work and get to know my team more closely. I feel lucky to be working with such a great team of talented and really dedicated reporters, so I'm just really excited to enter this great pool of knowledge and pull from this knowledge and work together to report on local stories and people. I'm excited to get outside, too. You mentioned you're new here. I'm new here, too. We're both new here, so I'm excited to get outside in Milwaukee and start engaging with the people around me, getting to know the people around me, and bringing our listeners along with us for this great exploration.
