Ashley Westerman

Ashley Westerman is a Supervising Editor and Producer and lead Assignments Manager for Morning Edition. She is a long-time alumna of the show who rejoins the staff after a stint overseas living and working as a freelance reporter and audio producer based in the Philippines covering Southeast Asia and the Pacific, and then in Ukraine covering Russia's full-scale invasion.

An experienced reporter, editor and producer, Westerman has nearly 15 years of journalism experience – much of it here at NPR. She first arrived at NPR as a Morning Edition intern in 2011 and pitched a story on her very first day. She would go on to do a long detour to NPR member station 89.3 WRKF-FM in Baton Rouge, La., and then graduate school before landing back at NPR as a full-time producer at the show in June 2015. She was with Morning Edition until 2021, when she left to pursue a freelance reporting career overseas.

Westerman's journalism career has taken her many places across the world, including the bustling streets of Manila to cover the Philippines' 2022 Presidential Election and walking with endangered pachyderms in the Laos jungle, to over-crowded Rohingya refugee camps in southern Bangladesh and diving into an environmentally-friendly pearl farm in French Polynesia. She's also reported on environmental issues in China, lived and worked under Russian bombardment in Ukraine and followed the aftermath of the devastating eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai submarine volcano. Meanwhile, she has criss-crossed the US covering presidential elections, followed closely the collapse of the Appalachian coal mining industry and covered various Asian American issues – including adoption and immigration. In 2019, she detailed her journey of finding her birth mother in the Philippines for NPR.

Her byline can also be found at PRX's The World, Voice of America, Rest of World, Foreign Policy, Free Speech News and BBC World. In March 2022, she was the lead field producer in Ukraine for Ukraine Stories, a 20-episode podcast about the first months of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine produced by Fearless Media and launched on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon.

Westerman is an award winning journalist with a Gracie Award for her work with then-Morning Edition host Noel King in St. Paul-Minneapolis during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and several local AP awards from her time at WRKF-FM in Baton Rouge, La. She is also a two-time East-West Center fellow (2018 Jefferson Fellowship and 2023 Asia Pacific Journalism Fellowship) and a two-time International Center for Journalists Fellow (2013 Bringing Home The World and 2014 Hearst Foundation Health Fellowship).

Westerman was born in the Philippines and raised in rural Western Kentucky. She is an alumna of the University of Kentucky, where she obtained a B.A. in Journalism and Political Science. She also attended the University of Maryland for her M.A. in Journalism.