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Sara Girard is an award-winning multimedia storyteller and investigative journalist, currently living in France.
Sara fights for the underdog, connects with people and tells their stories boldly with authenticity and empathy. She loves to write, shoot and edit, and she feels at home in solutions-based, community-oriented and investigative storytelling. She's brought to light issues regarding Florida's failing unemployment system, students’ safety at bus stops, school threat arrests, criminal justice misconduct, formerly incarcerated people struggling to survive, violence performed on live video, and much more. See her investigations with WINK News here. Before moving abroad, Sara spent three years as an investigative reporter for WINK News in Fort Myers, FL, after receiving both her undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Florida. While getting her master's, Sara also worked as a multimedia journalist for WCJB TV20 News in Gainesville. Sara is a firm believer in constantly improving her storytelling and has attended multiple conferences including the Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) Conference in 2018 and 2019 and National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) News Video Workshop in 2019 and virtually in 2020. To expand her expertise in using multimedia for advocacy, she attended the Becker Digital Strategies Digital Organizing Workshop in March 2021. Find her resume here. Most recently in 2021, The Florida Bar recognized Sara and her news station with the Parker Thompson Award for Outstanding Legal Journalism for her reporting on the outcomes of students who made school threats. Between 2019 and 2021, Sara won two Florida Association of Broadcast Journalists (FABJ) Awards and was nominated for two Suncoast Emmy Awards for her ongoing reporting on Florida's unemployment system and a series of reports on danger at school bus stops. In 2019, Sara received the Young Journalist Award in broadcast from the Press Club of Southwest Florida. Before that, she and two different groups of her former colleagues at UF won a pro regional Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Innovation reporting on life after prison in Florida and earned 2nd place in the SPJ Florida Pro Awards for Multimedia Feature for their deep dive into the impacts and consequences of live-streamed video. Sara loves traveling, trying new cuisines, rollerskating, reading about history and political theory, watching local theater, and hanging out with her many nieces and nephews. |