Aloha!​ My name is Andrew Hongo, and I'm a multimedia journalist, documentary filmmaker, and storyteller. There's nothing I love more than hearing peoples' stories -- the heartwarming, the inspiring, the heartbreaking, the unbelievable -- and crafting those stories into a piece that can reach the wider world.

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I'm currently based in Northern California, where I teach video journalism at San Francisco State University and work on independent documentary films. My latest project: an in-depth look at how San Francisco became the first major US city to vote to close down its juvenile hall, and how a group of women who had been in juvenile hall themselves were the catalyzing force behind the movement.

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Before this I worked for Dateline NBC in New York City as an associate producer. It was a dream job in many ways -- I got to criss-cross the country (and occasionally the globe) covering the biggest stories of the day. Some of my favorites: getting embedded with a group of American WWII vets as they retraced their journey to Normandy on the 70th anniversary of D-Day (those guys are just plain amazing); or chronicling the challenges facing a middle school in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Those are the sorts of stories I love to do: ones that capture the human experience, the challenges and triumphs of life that remind us that in the end, we're not so different from one another.

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I got my M.A. in journalism from New York University; while there, I produced a 40-minute documentary entitled "Legacy," about streetkids in Cambodia and the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge. My B.A. is from Yale University, where I majored in English Language and Literature and sang in the Whiffenpoofs (funny name, I know, but great music).

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