Josie Fischels
Arts & Culture ReporterExpertise: Performance art, visual art, Iowa life
Education: The University of Iowa
Favorite Iowa Destination: Dunnings Springs, Decorah
Experience:
- Covered local and statewide arts, news, and lifestyle features for <i>The Daily Iowan</i>, <i>The Denver Post</i>, NPR and currently for IPR
- Has written features on Iowans participating in the Hollywood writers’ strike, the nation’s largest historic theatre backdrop collection – housed in Iowa, the reopening of the African American Museum of Iowa and an ‘inside-the-culture’ feature on local drag kings, among others
- Is an award-winning reporter, including a retrospective of Iowa’s first poet laureate, Marvin Bell, following his death in 2021
- Writes regularly for IPR’s internationally award-winning newsletters
- Covered the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics, climate and the Kabul takeover by the Taliban in 2021 for NPR’s news desk
- Served as an editor and mentor for multiple projects with NPR’s Next Generation Radio
- Created IPR’s weekly news quiz and launched IPR’s TikTok (follow us!)
My Latest Stories
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The nearly mile-long light sculpture titled Evanescent Field covers the museum's exterior. It will light up the museum each night at sunset. -
Rainbow Kitten Surprise is back and better than ever. The band is working their way through a lengthy tour of their 2024 album, Love Hate Music Box, with another record on the way. -
The Eastern Iowa Arts Academy, once split between three locations, is now united under one roof in the historic Arthur Elementary School building. -
There's never been a better time to be a local bookworm. From cozy neighborhood nooks to sleek, modern spaces built for browsing, a wave of new independent bookstores has arrived to breathe fresh life into the state’s literary scene. -
Hundreds of arts groups across the country saw their National Endowment for the Arts grants suddenly revoked on May 2. The Trump administration has proposed new priorities for arts funding and has suggested eliminating the agency. -
Senate File 146 would prohibit the use of automated bots to purchase online tickets at concerts and sporting events. -
The Waterloo Center for the Arts is home to the largest publicly held collection of Haitian art in the country, having grown to over 2,000 pieces. Though facing NEH grant cuts, a collaborative exhibition at the Des Moines Art Center hopes to bring attention to the full collection. -
The Lifespan of a Fact follows an intern, an editor and a celebrated writer in a struggle to fact-check an essay that blurs the lines between truth and falsehood. The play, which opens on the Riverside stage in Iowa City on April 18, is adapted from a real essay-turned-novel co-written by University of Iowa Nonfiction Program Director John D’Agata and fact-checker Jim Fingal. -
Property owners unexpectedly painted over multiple murals on University Laundry in Des Moines to prep the building for sale, including an image of the late civil rights leader, Freedom Rider and U.S. Rep. John Lewis. -
Iowa State University students working across design, modeling and more than a dozen operational committees have put on a full-length fashion show since 1982.
