Five top veteran freelance journalists are playing a key role in the Beyond the Border project.

Through support from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, they travel with the BTB team in Arizona/Sonora and NYC providing guidance and inspiration to students as well as produce their own multimedia reports for publication nationwide.

Selected from a highly competitive pool of applicants, the five freelancers include:

Monica Campbell, Monica Campbell, who started her journalism career at the San Jose Business Journal 17 years ago, is currently researching violence in Ciudad Juarez for the Carr Center for Human Rights at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Before completing a Nieman fellowship there last May, Campbell was a freelance Latin American correspondent based in Mexico City for six years, her work appearing in publications as varied as The Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle and The Chronicle of Higher Education, to magazines including Amnesty International Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review and Marie Claire. She was the Mexico consultant for the Committee to Protect Journalists for two years and is now also co-producing a documentary funded by Latino Public Broadcasting chronicling the life of activist-journalist Brad Will who was murdered in Mexico in 2006.

Giovanna Drpic, a Bolivian native who is also Peruvian, German and Croatian, is a bilingual freelance reporter/fill-in anchor working at the New York Fox duopoly WNYW and WWOR. Drpic started freelancing last May after reporting, producing, anchoring and editing for television newscasts in New York, Orlando, Memphis, Hunstville, Alabama, and West Palm Beach, and for syndicated business and technology shows and newsmagazines that aired on PBS, CNBC and stations throughout the south. Her most recent award was a NY Emmy Award with a team for Best Newscast on WWOR titled “Miracle on the Hudson”.

Sergio Quintana, a native of New Mexico now living in San Francisco, has 14 years experience as a multimedia journalist who has specialized in enterprise storytelling, live reporting and investigative journalism. Able to manage multiple platforms simultaneously along with strong video editing and photography skills, Quintana has been a television, radio, and online reporter and news video editor for stations and broadcast-associated websites in San Francisco, Raleigh, North Carolina, Albuquerque, Los Angeles and Roswell, New Mexico. He is fully bilingual, well versed in live streaming and live blogging, and is currently producing and directing a documentary titled “Through the Haze”. His most recent award was a Peabody Award given to KTVU-TV in Oakland this year, in which he contributed to the coverage of the controversial police shooting on the BART public transportation system. www.svqjournalist.com

A native of Uruguay, Valeria Fernández has been covering the Mexican and Guatemalan immigrant communities in Arizona and the many angles and faces of the immigration debate for almost the entire 10 years she has been in the U.S. Last year, she left her job as senior reporter for La Voz in Phoenix and embarked on a freelance career in English and Spanish that has led her to do pieces for the Arizona Republic, the Inter Press Service, La Opinión, Colorlines Magazine, El Mensajero, CNN, CNN en Español and the Phoenix New Times in which she more recently broke stories on pregnant women being shackled at childbirth by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. She is also working on a film project called “Arizona” documenting the impact of state policies aimed at undocumented immigrants and the fear tactics in the political debate on the issue.

Born and raised on the border, El Paso native Monica Ortiz Uribe has been in the journalism business for five years, the last two of them as a freelance radio reporter for National Public Radio, Public Radio International and Radio Bilingue. Before that, she was a special contributor and assistant to Mexico City correspondents in Ciudad Juárez for the Dallas Morning News and The Washington Post. Soon after graduating from UTEP, she worked for two years as a reporter at the Waco Tribune-Herald, where she also supervised editorial content for a syndicated Spanish-language weekly and networked with Cox Spanish publications in Arizona, Austin, and Palm Beach.