Gisela Pérez de Acha

Bio

Gisela Pérez de Acha Gisela Pérez de Acha is a supervising reporter and lecturer, who oversees teams of student investigators and journalists through Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center and Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program. She trains journalists and other professionals on methods for open source investigations, cybersecurity, and resiliency. Gisela is part of an Emmy award-winning team at the New York Times for her collaboration on the story about The Siege of Culiacán and a digital safety trainer with PEN America. She reported on extremism for “American Insurrection,” a co-publication with ProPublica, Frontline, and the UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program, which won the George Polk Award in 2022. Before being a journalist, Gisela was trained as a human rights lawyer. She was also a digital investigations trainer for the Human Rights Center and Amnesty International’s Digital Verification Corps, a global network of volunteers who fact-check social media posts about war crimes and human rights violations. Born and raised in Mexico, Gisela speaks fluent Spanish, English, French, and Portuguese. She has a master’s degree from Berkeley Journalism.

Publications

• “I Felt Hate More Than Anything”: How an Active Duty Airman Tried to Start a Civil War, ProPublica, with Kathryn Hurd and Ellie Lightfoot, and Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program.
• US-expelled Haitians fuel charter business to Latin America, Associated Press, with Julie Watson, Katie Licari, Trenton Daniel, and Patricia Luna.
• The Plan to Rescue El Chapo’s Son: Guns, Chaos, and Fear, New York Times, with Andréa Schmidt and others.

Classes

• Open Source Investigations and Investigative Journalism (J264B / L224 Spring 2024: Open Source Investigations II), with Alexa Koenig and David Barstow