Our Board

Susan Banowsky

Susan Banowsky is a former television news producer and attorney.  After receiving her degree in Radio/TV Management from the University of Louisiana at Monroe in 1986, she worked as a television news producer for four years. Banowsky then enrolled in The University of Texas School of Law, graduating with highest honors in 1993.  She began her legal career in Austin, Texas, at Baker & Botts, practicing civil litigation. From 2000 through 2002, Banowsky served as the Chair of the Opinion Committee for the Office of the Attorney General of Texas. In 2002, Banowsky returned to private practice, first at a small litigation firm and then at Vinson & Elkins, where she built a practice focused on open government law. After nearly 20 years practicing law, Banowsky turned to helping her husband Bill with the businesses he created, including Violet Crown Cinemas, a movie theater company with locations in Santa Fe, Austin and Charlottesville, Virginia.

Julia Goldberg

Goldberg has been a professional journalist for more than 20 years, serving as editor of the Santa Fe Reporter from December 2000 through April 2011, during which time the paper won dozens of national awards for investigative reporting, writing, design and web innovation. She is the author of Inside Story: Everyone’s Guide to Reporting and Writing Creative Nonfiction (Leaf Storm Press, 2017) and an editor of Best Altweekly Writing 2009-2010 (Northwestern University Press). Julia also previously held the editorial chair for the national Association of Alternative Newsweeklies board of directors, helping to design, coordinate and oversee national journalism workshops and web projects. She served as a full-time faculty member in the Creative Writing Department at Santa Fe University of Art and Design in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she taught a variety of nonfiction writing courses and was the faculty advisor for the student online magazine. She has also taught journalism workshops in Mexico, Costa Rica and India, as well as at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe.

Laura Paskus

Paskus is a correspondent for New Mexico PBS. She covered the environment beat for New Mexico Political Report, and has been writing about New Mexico’s natural resources and communities since 2002, as an assistant editor of High Country News, a radio producer at KUNM-FM, managing editor of Tribal College Journal and a freelancer for a variety of publications including the Santa Fe Reporter, New Mexico In Depth and Indian Country Today. She’s also a graduate student in the University of New Mexico’s Geography and Environmental Studies Department.

Hampton Sides

Hampton is editor-at-large for Outside and a frequent contributor to National Geographic and other magazines. His journalistic work, collected in numerous published anthologies, has been twice nominated for National Magazine Awards for feature writing. He is the author of the bestselling histories Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, Hellhound On His Trail, and, most recently, In the Kingdom of Ice, which recounts the heroic polar voyage of the U.S.S. Jeannette during the Gilded Age.

Director’s Bio

Julie Ann Grimm

Grimm has served as editor of the Santa Fe Reporter since mid-2013 and also became its associate publisher, then publisher, in 2016. A 2001 graduate of the journalism school at the University of Missouri-Columbia, she covered city hall and regional government at The Santa Fe New Mexican for 10 years and also spent several years at the Associated Press New Mexico bureau. She was a founding board member of the Rio Grande chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists and has served as its president and coordinator for the regional conference in Santa Fe.