ABOUT

Hi! My name is Fiona Kelliher, and I’m an award-winning freelance journalist, pursuing a master’s degree at the London School of Economics and Political Science from 2024-2025. I focus on investigative and features reporting through a sociological lens.

From 2022-2024, I was based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I was an editor at VOD English—the hardest-hitting of Cambodia’s few independent newsrooms—until the government shut it down.

My Southeast Asia reporting has also appeared in The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Nikkei Asia, Al Jazeera, Radio Free Asia, Rest of World and Coda Story, among others. My investigations have uncovered Cambodian Red Cross’s financial links to alleged cyberscammers, a tycoon’s secret plans for dams that would expel thousands of people from their land, and drafts of draconian laws related to cybersecurity, personal data and cybercrime, as well as investments in facial recognition technology. My ongoing coverage of mass evictions at the Unesco heritage site Angkor Wat spawned a swell of international interest and was cited in a subsequent Amnesty International report that was brought to the World Heritage Committee.

I also covered Cambodia’s 2023 elections and the Hun family’s dynastic handover of power for Al Jazeera through multiple features and daily news stories, and was the first to write about a dispute between former prime minister Hun Sen and Facebook for Foreign Policy and AJ. More broadly, I’m interested in showing how people push and poke holes in the systems surrounding them, ranging from monks embracing TikTok to a group of women waging weekly protests over the imprisonment of their husbands to dissidents fighting the development of Phnom Penh’s last natural lake.

Other topics that interest me include intergenerational change and historical memory, which I explored in this longform piece about Khmer Rouge soldiers passing genocide myths to their grandchildren and this piece about how dictators’ online speech should be preserved.

I previously covered the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of race and labor for The Mercury News, a daily California newspaper. My 2021 investigation into a Covid-19 workplace outbreak law was reviewed by California's top workplace safety regulator and cited in a state Supreme Court case to stop local governments from hiding outbreak details. I also was part of a three-person team that investigated how California's COVID-19 policies failed Latino communities, producing a series that won a Society of Professional Journalists award and was a finalist for the national Victor K. McElheny Award. My work has earned other awards from the National Association of Real Estate Editors and the California Journalism Award for coverage of local government, explanatory reporting and in-depth reporting on separate occasions.

In 2021, I worked as the paper’s main wildfire field reporter and embedded with fire crews and communities at two of the biggest fires in California history, earning a Society of Professional Journalists award for best breaking news coverage.

I graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University with a sociology B.A., where I received the school’s most outstanding undergraduate sociology student award.

I’m no longer on Twitter, but please contact me at fi.kelliher@gmail.com. I’m always looking for new editors and tips.