Alva French is a working Video Reporter who earned an MA in Journalism from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. She was selected by her peers to be the student speaker at the Class of 2011’s graduation ceremony alongside The New Yorker’s David Remnick. See her speech here.

Born in Paris, Alva is a dual national of France/EU and the US, bilingual and attended public schools in Washington Heights, NYC and Albany, NY.

She has an undergraduate degree from New York University.

Alva is producing and directing a documentary on her maternal grandparents, a married interracial couple who escaped the US in 1949 to start a family and pursue careers in the arts in France. Her grandmother was a friend and literary agent to James Baldwin, as well as co-founder, with Shelley Roitman, of the Paris-based production company Shelltrie Productions/Enterprises Unlimited. In 2014, Alva’s grandmother was posthumously recognized as a vital contributor to the 1964 founding of Democrats Abroad.

Alva’s journalism work has been published by BuzzFeed News, The New York Daily News, Newyorker.com, WNYC.org, The Associated Press, NBC News, and the Huffington Post.

Feel free to find her using the Signal app and follow her on Twitter.

Follow @supernana
Updated July 2018