Associate Director

Ashley Bates is the Associate Director of Wallace House. In her role, she manages the daily operations of Wallace House and the Knight-Wallace Fellowship activities and supports the director in strategically executing all organizational programs and initiatives– including alumni engagement, outreach activities across the journalism industry, and recruitment for the Knight-Wallace Fellowships. Ashley previously served as the Program Manager for the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program and managed graduate student recruitment and career mentorship initiatives for the University of Michigan’s International Institute. She has worked as an investigative journalist in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, and the United States, producing videos and long-form features for The Nation, Haaretz, Mother Jones, Huffington Post, Tikkun, Jerusalem Post Magazine, GlobalPost, and Columbia Journalism Review. Fluent in Arabic, she served for eight years as the Program Director and then the Executive Director of an Israeli-Palestinian dialogue and social justice advocacy organization called Hands of Peace. She earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Amherst College and a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School.
asbates@umich.edu