Announcement from National Editor Matea Gold, Deputy National Editor Philip Rucker and Senior Editor for Visual Enterprise Ann Gerhart:
We are delighted to announce that Kainaz Amaria is joining The Washington Post as the visual enterprise editor for National, pioneering a new role aimed at expanding our visual journalism and conceiving of innovative storytelling approaches.
In this key leadership role, Kainaz will oversee immersive, visual-first stories on both quick-turn news and longer-term projects. She will work with reporters and editors from all of National’s coverage teams as well as partner with the Audio, Data, Design, Graphics, Photo and Video departments to elevate our coverage. She will report to the national editor and work closely with Senior Editor for Visual Enterprise and the other visual enterprise editors to develop and share best practices for multidisciplinary storytelling and to drive more collaborative, immersive journalism across the newsroom.
Kainaz comes to The Post from Vox, where she has served as their first-ever visuals editor. She brings with her a decade of experience developing collaborative stories that have broken with convention, won awards, drawn huge audiences and influenced legislation.
At Vox, she has run an interdisciplinary team responsible for graphics, interactives, photography, data and design for on-site and off-platform stories. Along with overseeing daily and short-term stories, she has been responsible for setting the visual team’s philosophy, workflows and aligning their visual journalism with the newsroom’s editorial goals. She has spearheaded large collaborations, including live election results and projects such as one on supertrees, and fostered an environment where creative journalists thrived. She is known as a sharp editor, a diplomatic team leader, a shrewd problem-solver and a journalist with a strong ethical compass.
Before Vox, Kainaz was an editor on NPR’s Visual Team, where she played a key role in creating new storytelling formats. She drove the U.S.-Mexico border reporting alongside Steve Inskeep and assumed multiple roles in NPR’s “Planet Money Makes a T-shirt,” including managing producer, photographer and videographer. The project won the radio network numerous awards, including a News and Documentary Emmy.
Kainaz began her career as a newspaper photographer, driving hundreds of miles a day around the Bay Area covering council meetings, high school sports and breaking news. After nearly 10 years of working as a photojournalist — covering stories from President Barack Obama’s inauguration for the then-St. Petersburg Times to driving the length of the Grand Trunk Road in India for NPR — she decided to gradually shift her focus from being an assignment photographer to someone who worked with others to more fully shape the way news stories are told.
In 2020, Kainaz was honored with the John Long Ethics Award by the National Press Photographers Association for her writing and criticism on the photojournalism industry and visual language.
Kainaz has a BA in international relations and political science from Boston University and an MA in photography from the School of Visual Communication, Ohio University. In 2010, she was a Fulbright Scholar and completed a short film on the Parsi Zoroastrian community in Mumbai.
She and her husband, Gene Demby, a host of NPR’s Code Switch, welcomed their first child in November 2021. Kainaz was born in Mumbai, India, and grew up in California, which means she’s always dreaming of the Pacific Ocean and eating Indian street food. She loves to travel, hates sloths, can never pass up good pizza and is a fan of puns.