Julian Hayda

I am currently the coordinating producer for NPR's operations in Ukraine. This means that I manage logistics for a team of as many as thirty correspondents, producers, interpreters, security advisers, and drivers, working together to achieve the network's editorial goals. I also prepare daily news briefs, work on breaking news, report for the hourly newscast, and contribute to NPR's digital coverage. Occasionally I report long-form feature stories on culture, history, and identity for NPR's news magazine shows.

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Before coming to NPR I moved to Ukraine with my wife to study religion and work as a freelance journalist. I also spent much of 2021 and 2022 working in the area of online human rights and free speech as a Newmark Journalist Scholar at the Global Cyber Alliance. 

I have more than a decade of on-air and off-air editorial experience, working for multiple public media stations. I hosted conversations on WUWM, Milwaukee's NPR, and worked as an engagement strategist at Illinois Newsroom, the public media collaborative run by Illinois Public Media and hosted by the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

From 2016-2019, I was a producer for a daily global issues talk show called Worldview on WBEZ, Chicago Public Radio. Before being a producer there, I was a regular guest and commentator on Ukraine.

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I directed a feature documentary titled Block Four: Chernobyl 2011 and produced news segments surrounding deposed Ukrainian president Yanukovych’s participation in the 2012 NATO Summit among other short documentaries. I also participated in research projects on Romani music, culture, and human rights with the University of Pittsburgh in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia, and completed a seminar in International Law with the DePaul University Law School at the University of Havana in Cuba.

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​In 2013, my friends and I founded a youth-run non-profit called the Group for Tomorrow's Ukraine (originally titled the Euromaidan Journalist Collective), whose mission went from reporting on the 2013-2014 Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine to providing analysis for the subsequent crisis there.

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I've presented on Ukraine at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, Fordham University, Stanford University, the DePaul University School of Law, as well as at other conferences around the United States. I'm also a member of the Kyiv Committee of Chicago Sister Cities International.

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