Tara Pixley

2026 Nova Media Fellow

Tara Pixley, PhD, is a queer, Jamaican-American visual journalist and media innovation strategist whose visual work frames race, gender, climate futures, LGBTQ+, and immigrant communities through a solutions lens. Her work has been published by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Apple, The North Face, NPR, Newsweek, The Atlantic, HuffPost, Allure, ProPublica, and ESPN, among many others. She is a Fulbright Specialist in Visual Media and has been named a Reynolds Journalism Innovation Fellow, Pulitzer Center Grantee, IWMF NextGen Fellow & Gwen Ifill Fellow, World Press Photo Solutions Visual Journalism Initiative grantee, and a Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard.

Tara previously served as vice president of National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) and currently serves on the boards of Stocksy United and Photography Ethics Centre. She is associate partner/co-founder of Aegis Safety Alliance and executive director/co-founder of Authority Collective, an organization dedicated to establishing access and equity for marginalized visual storytellers in media industries. She co-authored the 2025 book Critical Photojournalism: Contemporary Ethics & Practices with Judy Walgren.

Media Fellowship Project

Tracing the health toll of incarceration on Black mothers and their families in Los Angeles, and investigating reforms already working elsewhere that could bring healing within reach in California.

Los Angeles County operates the largest jail system in the United States, and Black women—especially mothers—are disproportionately incarcerated within it. Although overall U.S. incarceration rates have been falling, women’s incarceration rates remain at near-historic highs, according to the Prison Policy Initiative’s September 2025 report. In California, Black residents are incarcerated at nearly nine times the rate of white residents, and the majority of women in California’s prisons are mothers. Severed family bonds fuel intergenerational trauma: Incarcerated women face elevated rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, postpartum depression, and anxiety, all compounded by separation from their children. Yet no sustained visual journalism project has examined these intersecting crises through the specific lens of Black motherhood in California.

Beyond Bars, Tara’s Media Fellow project, centers a question at once journalistic and restorative: What does healing actually look like for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated Black mothers and their families, and what reforms, already working in other states and systems, could be scaled in California to make that healing possible? This project directly aligns with Nova’s priority area of mental health, well-being, and justice in all its forms, including emerging paradigms for compassion and dignity in carceral and legal systems. It connects health to upstream social determinants including race, gender, economic precarity, institutional policy, and traces how those forces shape the bodies, minds, and family bonds of some of California’s most underserved women.

In 2024, California voters approved Proposition 1, a $6.4 billion mental health bond that promises expanded behavioral health and housing services, with some funding designated for justice-impacted populations. Beyond Bars will investigate whether and how those funds are reaching incarcerated and formerly incarcerated Black mothers while foregrounding proven solutions that could change the current outcomes.

Media Fellow Publications

The Sonic Commons

Reasons to be Cheerful explores how environmental noise impacts our health, and how we can design spaces that sound the way we want them to.

Early Childhood Flourishing as a Foundation for Future Planetary Health: Building Relational, Prosocial and Pro-Planetary Capacities

In Challenges—Journal of Planetary Health, Nova Scholars Christina Bethell and Susan Prescott connect the dots between early childhood flourishing and planetary health.