Hannah Dreier

Hannah Dreier graduated from Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and spent the first years of her career at The San Jose Mercury News.

Dreier joined Associated Press as a politics reporter in the Sacramento bureau and later covered the business of gambling from Las Vegas. She was the Venezuela correspondent for Associated Press for three years, moving to Caracas in 2014 amid a nationwide protest movement, and has told the story of the country's unraveling from inside prisons, hospitals and factories. Her 2016 "Venezuela Undone" series illustrated Venezuela’s social and economic collapse through deeply reported accounts of ordinary citizens struggling to survive and was recognized by the Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest, the Michael Kelly Award, and the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Following the Narcosobrinos incident which saw president Nicolás Maduro's nephews arrested in the United States for drug trafficking, Hannah Dreier was detained by SEBIN (Bolivarian Intelligence Service) agents in Sabaneta, Barinas. Agents threatened her during an interrogation, saying they would behead her like ISIL did to James Foley and said that they would let her go for a kiss. Finally, agents said that they wanted to coerce the United States to exchange Maduro's nephews for Dreier, accusing her of being a spy and sabotaging the Venezuelan economy.

In 2017 ProPublica announced that Hannah Dreier would join its staff as a reporter covering immigration, starting on July 10.

Her stories have been recognized by the Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism, the Overseas Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, ASNE, the National Headliner Awards, the Livingston Awards and the California Newspaper Publishers Association. In 2016 she was the recipient of the James Foley Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism for her coverage of the recurring turmoil in Venezuela.