Pankaj Khadka
REPORTING FELLOW
Pankaj Khadka, a Nepali native, is a graduate photojournalism student at Boston University.
He graduated magna cum laude with a B.S. in print journalism and a B.A. in photography from McNeese State University, and worked as a reporter/photographer for a year at the Chronicle-News in Trinidad, Colorado, before venturing into graduate school.
His reporting quests have taken him to parades and festivals across the swamps of southwest Louisiana and to rodeos, elections and fire outbreaks in the foothills of southern Colorado and mountain peaks of northern Colorado.
Along with producing emotionally-laden stories of drug usage among middle- and high- school students, he has written of aspiring beauty queens, chronicled the achievements of retiring community leaders, and coordinated state and regional election coverage in Boston and New Hampshire.
Some of his works include in-depth reporting and photo stories on community leaders, regional cultures and traditions of different American communities, including coverage of last year's historic climate change march in New York, the closure of the historic Suffolk Downs racetrack in Boston and the Eric Garner and Black Lives Matter protests in the Greater Boston area.
His current project is documentation of life on Blue Hill Avenue, a four-mile nerve that stretches through Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan neighborhoods outside of Boston.
This work explores the everyday lives of the people who reside, work or commute in the Mattapan section of Blue Hill.
His works have been featured on nationally critiqued shows and picked by news wires such as CNN.
Khadka aspires to become a photojournalist for the same reasons all storytellers do—to lend a voice to the unheard and to identify and address the forgotten. With his story-telling expertise, he now wants to report on global crises and looks forward to sharing stories from Nepal, his home country devastated by earthquakes earlier this year.