Deborah Berry

Deborah Barfield Berry, a 2023 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, is a national correspondent for USA TODAY where she focuses on voting rights, civil rights and politics. 

Berry, an award-winning journalist, has spent most of her career in journalism in Washington, D.C., where she has covered Congress and national politics. She has also worked for Newsday, Knight Ridder News Service, the Providence Journal, the Times Herald Record and the Star Democrat. 

Berry was part of a Newsday team that won a 1997 Pulitzer for coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800. She recently won two 2023 National Association of Black Journalists Salute to Excellence Awards and three 2021 NABJ Salute to Excellence Awards, including two for stories about the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on communities of color and one for her contribution to a special section about the late civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis. She was also part of a team that won several awards for USA TODAY’s project 1619: Searching for Answers and was the lead reporter and co-creator of Seven Days of 1961, a multimedia civil rights project published in 2021. The civil rights project won several awards, including a 2022 NABJ award.

Berry is vice president of the board for the Washington Press Club Foundation and a volunteer with the Washington Association of Black Journalists urban high school journalism workshop. The native of Brooklyn, New York, is a graduate of the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism where in 2023 she was inducted into the Merrill College Hall of Fame