Jose Antonio Vargas, an award-winning multimedia journalist, is the founder of Define American, a new campaign that seeks to elevate the conversation around immigration.
Most recently, he was a senior contributing editor at the Huffington Post, where he launched the Technology and College sections. Prior to that, he covered tech and video game culture, HIV/AIDS in the nation's capital, and the 2008 presidential campaign for the Washington Post, and was part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for covering the Virginia Tech massacre. In 2007, Politico named him one of 50 Politicos to Watch. His 2006 series on HIV/AIDS in Washington, D.C. inspired a feature-length documentary -- The Other City -- which he co-produced and wrote. It world premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival and aired on Showtime. In 2010, he wrote an exclusive profile of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. A few months later, he wrote a groundbreaking essay that chronicled his life in America as an undocumented immigrant.
The media's evolution, and the breakdown of barriers between print and broadcast journalism, has guided his nearly 13-year reporting career. He's written for daily newspapers (Philadelphia Daily News, San Francisco Chronicle) and national magazines (The Atlantic, Rolling Stone) and has appeared on several national and international television and radio programs. On HuffPost, he created the blog Technology as Anthropology, which focuses on tech's impact on people and how we behave.
He taught a class on "Storytelling 2.0" at Georgetown University and served on the advisory board for the Knight-Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism, housed at American University. A very proud alumnus of Mountain View High School ('00) and San Francisco State University ('04), he loves jazz, hip-hop and anything by Gershwin, and worships at the altars of Altman, Almodovar, Didion, Baldwin and Orwell.
He dreamed of one day living in Manhattan after he saw Woody Allen's version of it. He currently resides in Manhattan.
