About

Beatrice Motamedi is a writer, teacher and journalist who turns classrooms into newsrooms. Born in Paris, she emigrated to the U.S. when she was seven years old with her Iranian-French family. A Stegner Fellow in creative writing at Stanford, Beatrice worked as a staff writer and editor for United Press International, the San Francisco Chronicle, WebMD and Health. In 2004, Beatrice decided to walk the talk of diversity by becoming a California credentialed teacher and working in inner-city high schools. Twelve-hour days in the company of 15-year-old immigrants from Mexico, Yemen, and Hong Kong transformed her. Since then, Beatrice has developed student-run publications and trained teachers in Oakland, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Ha Noi, Vietnam. Her students at The Urban School of San Francisco as well as with the Student Voice Project have won more than 200 state and national awards, including the National Scholastic Press Association’s Pacemaker, also known as the high school Pulitzer. A Dow Jones News Fund Distinguished Adviser and California Educator of the Year, Beatrice was a 2010-2011 California Endowment Health Journalism Fellow, writing a three-part series called “The Long Arm of Childhood” for the Oakland Tribune on the psychological and physical impact of stress on inner-city teens. Her work also has been published in the International Herald-Tribune, Salon, Wired, and two literary anthologies. Beatrice co-directs Newsroom by the Bay, a multimedia program for high school journalists. Currently, she is a 2014-15 Knight Fellow in journalism at Stanford.