Financial Officer Russell Contreras Reporter The Associated Press E-mail:rcontreras@ap.org

Russell Contreras is an immigration/minority affairs reporter at The Associated Press in Boston. In addition to his reporting duties, Contreras works as an online videographer and has trained staff in each of the AP New England bureaus on multimedia audio editing. He also teaches journalism part-time at Emerson College and is the co-founder with Maria Burns Ortiz of the NAHJ New England Chapter. And if that’s not enough, Contreras is a member of the community advisory board for WBGH-TV, the PBS station in Boston.

Before coming to the AP, Contreras worked as a reporter for the Boston Globe where he was in charge of multimedia projects for the regional sections. He has also worked at the Albuquerque Journal and AP Digital in New York City, and was a writing teacher in Houston and New York Public Schools.

Born and raised in Houston, Contreras is a fourth-generation Mexican American and comes from a long line of Mexican-American civil rights activists from LULAC of the 1950s and 1960s. His great-uncle, Ernest Eguia, attended a Mexican-American school where future president Lyndon Baines Johnson taught and would later cite during his 1965 “We Shall Overcome” speech.

Contreras first became a member of NAHJ in 1998 while a graduate student in history at the University of Houston and writing freelance investigative pieces for the alternative newsweekly, The Houston Press. As a student, Contreras interned at The Nation magazine and The Wall Street Journal, both in New York City. Contreras is scheduled this August to marry his wonderful fiancée, Mandi Torrez, a former sports reporter whom he met at the 2003 NAHJ convention in New York. They live in Boston with their cat, Gracie, and their dog, Tupac.