Leila Goldstein is a journalist based in Phnom Penh where she is an associate editor for CamboJA News and a freelance reporter covering stories across Southeast Asia. Her reporting has been published by NPR, Marketplace, The World, Southeast Asia Globe and Prachatai. She has covered the return of looted Cambodian relics, a historic environmental rights lawsuit in Thailand and the trafficking of Indonesian citizens in the illegal organ trade. She is the recipient of funding from the Pulitzer Center and Earth Journalism Network to support her reporting.
Before relocating to Cambodia in 2023, she was a public radio journalist in the U.S. As a reporter at NPR member station WYSO, she reported and produced the award-winning podcast Trafficked about misinformation and human trafficking. Her investigation of the Ohio Attorney General’s human trafficking stings uncovered that the vast majority of the victims the state claimed to have rescued were in fact arrested. The podcast received a First Place Series Award from the Public Media Journalists Association and a Best Enterprise Reporting Award from the Ohio Associated Press Media Editors.
She is a former Shansi Fellow, and a graduate of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and Oberlin College. Find her @leila_goldstein or leilamgoldstein@gmail.com.
Photo by Joel Tsui