Makepeace Sitlhou is an independent journalist, who has been working in the media and communications field for over a decade in India. Makepeace has been covering India’s Northeast for several leading news publications like Vox, The Baffler, The Daily Beast, Nikkei Asia, The British Medical Journal, Vogue Business, Middle East Eye, Foreign Policy, The Juggernaut, Asia Times, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera, Fair Observer, Popula, BBC, Vice World News, Sojourners, and TRT World.
Her freelance work has been widely recognized by awards in national and international forums. More recently, she was jointly awarded the prestigious Red Ink Award by the Mumbai Press Club in the Lifestyle category for a story she wrote for CNN International.
In 2017, she received the UNFPA sponsored Laadli Media award for gender sensitivity for her coverage of tribal women’s protest in Manipur for The Ladies Finger. Her story on Black rice in Manipur published in Popula won the South Asian Journalism Association Award in the Business category in 2019. In 2020, she received the National Media Award for her coverage of coal mining in Meghalaya post the National Green Tribunal ban.
Her work has been supported by organizations like Google News Initiative, Center for Financial Accountability, National Foundation for India, Zubaan Books in collaboration with Sasakawa Peace Foundation, Humsafar Trust, and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. Makepeace completed her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Psychology from the University of Delhi. She has previously worked with leading civil society organizations like Amnesty International and Breakthrough India and as a staff writer with The Alternative (Sattva Media) and The Print.
As a Humphrey fellow, she wishes to learn in-depth about the US immigration laws and policy, and their implementation along the US-Mexico border. She’d like to study the parallels between the Indian and American immigration systems from the angles of national security, human rights, bureaucracy and citizen-centric politics.