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On a recent overseas assignment for NPR, correspondent Kat Lonsdorf ’09 and her field team traveled to central Beirut amid a ceasefire in Lebanon. The pause in fighting followed the war’s deadliest day, when Israeli airstrikes on what the Israeli military identified as Hezbollah targets killed more than 350 people across Lebanon in 10 minutes. Lonsdorf spent two days with the family of 26-year-old Zahraa Abboud, who went missing when the apartment building where she had been staying was destroyed in the airstrikes.

“When we first visit the site five days later, a giant mound of rubble spills onto the sidewalks. It’s littered with broken glass and personal items,” Lonsdorf reported. “There’s stuffed animals, toothbrushes, shoes, backpacks. There’s a couch, a fridge. You can just see little glimpses of all the people’s lives who lived in this building.”

A few days later, Zahraa’s remains were identified through DNA testing. A week after filing her initial report, Lonsdorf attended Zahraa’s funeral in the Abboud family’s village in southern Lebanon.

Experiences like this have shaped Lonsdorf’s approach to reporting. “I’m usually sent somewhere where news is happening, and when someone talks to me about one of the worst days of their lives, it’s a huge responsibility to boil it all down to two or three minutes and tell it to our audience,” she says from NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C. “It’s their emotions and their thoughts, and I’m always trying to make sure I do that as best I can.”

That responsibility also comes with extraordinary access. “The coolest part of the job is getting a pass to talk to anyone as long as they will talk to you. It’s opened up the world to me in a totally different way than just traveling. I’ve sat in Bedouin huts for interviews. I’ve had people take me inside their homes in remote villages in northern Kenya.” Even after visiting nearly 60 countries—“I have never really counted”—there’s no shortage of places she’d still like to experience.

Growing up in a tiny town outside Madison, Wisconsin, Lonsdorf applied to Occidental sight unseen and enrolled “with a nice little scholarship.” “I was a study-abroad student in Japan in high school, so it’s not like I had never left Wisconsin. But being out of my comfort zone of high school friends and my little town was a lot.

“A lot of the building blocks of my career started at Occidental, even if it was a winding path,” Lonsdorf adds. She majored in diplomacy and world affairs and took journalism courses with Adjunct Assistant Professor Bob Sipchen. “There was no journalism major, but in some ways that was great, because I always tell aspiring journalists that they should focus on something other than journalism.”

Lonsdorf was a freshman in high school when 9/11 happened, sparking an interest in the Middle East “because it was always in the news,” she says. Having learned Japanese in high school, Lonsdorf turned to Arabic in college, taking multiple classes at Occidental and studying at the University of Jordan during a year of study abroad. While most of her time was devoted to intensive Arabic instruction, she explored a region that would eventually become central to her reporting, traveling throughout Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and Qatar. When Lonsdorf returned to campus for her senior year, she secured a yearlong internship with ABC News in L.A., working with producer Julia Seifer ’85. 

But graduating into the Great Recession in 2009 made a journalism career seem increasingly out of reach for Lonsdorf. For nearly eight years, she worked in the restaurant industry in downtown Los Angeles, first as a server and later as a bartender. A couple of times a year, she’d pick up contract work with ProjectExplorer, a U.S.-based nonprofit that produced short online educational videos. “I would take two weeks off at the bar and go to Zambia and film,” she says.

Lonsdorf now credits those years with sharpening one of her most important reporting skills. “I think that my time working in the service industry has made me a much better reporter,” she says. “I can talk to anybody.” 

In the fall of 2015, Lonsdorf enrolled in Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. (“That was a bit of a Hail Mary—I applied at 3 a.m. one night,” she recalls with a laugh.) She received a scholarship, completed the yearlong master’s program, and landed a postgraduate internship at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C. 

At 29, she was an intern in a cohort of 21-year-olds. “It was a humbling experience,” she says. “But that was OK. As soon as I walked in the NPR building, I said to myself, ‘I’m not letting them let me go. I’m going to figure out a way to stick around.’”

After her internship, Lonsdorf spent several months temping before joining All Things Considered as an entry-level producer, where she worked with veteran journalists Ari Shapiro and Mary Louise Kelly. Traveling with them, she watched experienced correspondents ask probing questions and navigate difficult stories with empathy and precision.

Those lessons prepared her for opportunities of her own. In February 2020, Lonsdorf traveled to Japan as the recipient of NPR’s Above the Fray fellowship, awarded annually to one early-career journalist. Co-sponsored by the John Alexander Project, the fellowship gave her the time and resources to pursue an underreported global story. She chose to report from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear exclusion zone, examining the area’s long-term recovery after the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and accompanying nuclear disaster.

The bulk of her reporting became the multipart series “Recovering Fukushima.” Reporting from inside the exclusion zone, Lonsdorf donned protective gear to visit the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, carrying a Geiger counter and dosimeter to document lingering radiation concerns. The series explored the difficult choices facing displaced residents and the slow reopening of communities within the exclusion zone, capturing both the enduring trauma of the disaster and the resilience of those rebuilding their lives.

“That was a big moment for me,” Lonsdorf says. While reporting from Japan, she covered the country’s early response to the COVID-19 pandemic, filing stories on the eerily quiet Tokyo Marathon—reduced from nearly 38,000 runners in 2019 to just 200 elite athletes the following year—and the annual bloom of Fukushima’s 1,000-year-old Takizakura cherry tree during Japan’s first state of emergency. After returning to Washington, she says, “I think the newsroom maybe saw me a little bit differently.”

From there, Lonsdorf started getting more opportunities to report internationally. She went to Israel as a producer in 2021 during the Israel-Palestine crisis. When Russia invaded Ukraine the following year, “That was an all-hands-on-deck moment,” Lonsdorf says, “so I was cycling in and out of Ukraine during the first year of the war a lot. I was mostly producing, but then eventually one of those cycles, my bosses said, ‘Do you want to go as a correspondent for a month?’”

In 2024, Lonsdorf moved to Tel Aviv for a year to become a full-time correspondent for NPR to help cover the region. Since returning from the Middle East, Lonsdorf is based in Washington, D.C. She primarily covers a broad mix of domestic stories, including the aftermath of the ICE shootings in Minneapolis earlier this year, with the occasional assignment abroad as news dictates. “It’s nice to be back in your own space, but I still travel a lot,” says Lonsdorf, who lives with her fiancé, Ben Swasey (a political editor at NPR), and their dog, Ellie (“not an NPR employee, sadly”). 

Following the flash floods in Central Texas in July 2025 that took 119 lives in Kerr County, Lonsdorf was reporting from Ingram, Texas. “Again, you’re walking into one of the worst days or weeks of a lot of people’s lives,” she says. “So you’re trying to figure out who might be willing to talk to you in this moment.” 

While walking around the remains of a trailer park next to the Guadalupe River, Lonsdorf met Sherry Sweeney, who had driven more than five hours overnight to help people find their lost pets. “We went out all day just looking for people’s cats and dogs that might have run away in the storm.” Together, they came upon 71-year-old Cindy McCarthey, a recent widow who was picking through the wreckage of her house looking for her lost cat, Rambo. 

“We were there for the moment that we found her lost cat, who was hiding in some nearby wreckage,” Lonsdorf says. “We got the moment on tape that they were reunited, which was really sweet. It’s these little glimmers of happiness in these otherwise dark times that are nice.”