Natasha Del Toro

Born to Puerto Rican parents and raised in a small North Carolina town, Natasha Del Toro is proud of her mixed cultural upbringing; she grew up on rice and beans, biscuits and Waffle House coffee. Dancing salsa. Speaking with a Southern accent.  She even had a mullet long before hipsters made it an ironically cool haircut. Sadly, those photos have all been burned.

As the only Latina in her community at the time, she learned to operate between different cultures. At a young age she noticed glaring racial divisions between blacks and whites in her town, stoking her sense of social justice.

Journalism has given her the opportunity to tell stories about underrepresented people and to cover issues of inequality and injustice, while trying to maintain a sense of humility, humor and compassion.

Obtaining her graduate degree from Columbia’s School of Journalism, she launched her broadcast journalism career working on the Curse of Inca Gold, a co-production between Frontline and New York Times filmed in Peru with correspondent Lowell Bergman. The film looked at the environmental impact of the world’s largest gold mining company and civil unrest with local campesinos. She also reported and produced short documentaries on artists in Cuba and Haiti and covered the 2008 Democratic National Convention for PBS Frontline World.

Later that year, at the height of the Great Recession, she started working as a staff videographer for TIME.com, where her reports on the Haiti earthquake were honored at the New York Press Club. She also traveled across the US with internationally renown photographer Joakim Eskildsen on an assignment about poverty in America. That project sparked a longterm interest in reporting on inequality and the broken social contract, leading to the creation of a book and multimedia website called American Realities as well as an Emmy award-winning documentary by KQED and Center for Investigative Reporting called Hunger in the Valley of Plenty, about food insecurity among migrant farmworkers in California’s Central Valley.

She did a Fulbright in Colombia, teaching a multimedia journalism class at the University of Antioquia and researching land rights and displacement. After completing her Fulbright, she landed a job as an on-camera correspondent at Fusion, an ABC/Univision joint venture in Miami, where she produced and fronted investigative documentaries about America's broken electoral system, the opioid crisis and Scott Pruitt, the former head of the EPA for Fusion's Naked Truth series.

Her work was awarded a DuPont and RFK award.  She was also part of the consortium of journalists that won a Pulitzer for reporting on the Panama Papers.  The Naked Truth became a popular docu-series on Netflix. She also produced segments about Puerto Rico on HBO's Outpost series and was one of the hosts of a politics and culture show called The Feed.

After Fusion’s unfortunate implosion in 2018, she started her own production company called Del Toro Productions, working as an independent journalist and developing projects for various outlets. She anchored Mic Dispatch, a news magazine show for Mic.com that went beyond the headlines to profile “the underrepresented, problem-solvers and provocateurs. “

She hosted and co-wrote Verified, a long-form investigative podcast that ran for four seasons, produced by Scripps and Stitcher and named one of the best of 2020 by The Atlantic.

Currently, she serves as an independent correspondent and host for Al Jazeera English where she regularly appears on Fault Lines, a current affairs documentary program on which she has received four Emmy nominations and won two Wilbur awards, and as a guest host on The Take, an award-winning global news podcast.

She also works for Scripps News as a correspondent on the current affairs show In Real Life, where she has reported and fronted several stories as well produced work for the digital platform More Perfect Union.

She also hosts PBS’s long-running America Reframed produced by World Channel and POV about the changing face and identity of the U.S.

Outside of work, she's been doing a lot of yoga and meditation in an effort to find work/life balance. She hasn't figured it out but she did finally learn how to do a headstand.