Project: The Texas Tribune. Austin, TX. Newsroom Reporting Fellow.

Meena Venkataramanan is a rising undergraduate senior from Tucson, Arizona pursuing a joint AB degree in English Literature and South Asian Studies. This summer, she is excited to be a reporting fellow for The Texas Tribune, where she will cover everything from the COVID-19 pandemic to electoral politics and immigration. Meena is passionate about the intersection of law, politics, and storytelling, and believes that public service ties all three together beautifully while providing a platform for the sharing of narratives to create lasting social change. As a journalist and creative nonfiction writer with bylines in POLITICO, ABC News, The Harvard Crimson, and the Harvard Political Review, Meena has also contributed to a FiveThirtyEight feature series and founded her own journalistic platform, Stories from the Border, to share narratives and reporting from the U.S.-Mexico border.

Aside from her journalistic work, Meena is the founder and president of the South Asian Americans in Public Service (SAAPS) initiative, a national movement to empower South Asian American students to enter careers in public service and become more civically engaged. She also edits creative nonfiction for The Harvard Advocate literary magazine's Migration Issue and is a research assistant for Professor Danielle Allen's Democratic Knowledge Project, through which she helps develop a nationwide K-12 civic education curriculum.

In her free time, Meena enjoys talking (too fast) about U.S. politics, reading fiction and personal essays, and trying different varieties of tea.