Alisa Joyce Barba is an award-winning journalist, producer, writer and editor with 25 years experience in both network and public broadcasting.  

For the past 12 years, she has served as the Western Bureau Chief for National Public Radio.  She was responsible for the editorial content and production of member station reporter and staff pieces for air on NPR's All Things Considered and Morning Edition.  

She developed multi-platform and web content for NPR's digital news, to complement radio news stories.  While monitoring news in the western US, she specialized in covering border and immigration issues and won numerous awards for editing series and stories on a issues ranging from failed US policies to fight a "war on drugs" to border corruption, native American health care and state budget issues.

Independent of NPR, she won the coveted Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Award for her work as Executive Producer of the 2001-2002 Documentary "Culture of Hate: Who Are We?".

Based in San Diego, her journalism work has focused heavily on military affairs, the impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the local community and on veterans’ mental and physical health care concerns. She won the Jerry Schumacher Award for Best Program about Health Care Issues: “Under the Knife: San Diego Medicine Confronts the Bottom Line”.

Prior to her work with NPR, Alisa was a producer for ABC News in Beijing, covering, among other stories, the Tiananmen Square uprising. From 1989-1995 Alisa was a Producer/Reporter for the MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour in New York and Washington DC.

She holds a Masters Degree in Chinese History from UCSD, and a BA from Middlebury College.