Dusty Christensen is an investigative reporter, editor, and educator whose work has appeared in outlets including The Nation, NPR, The Boston Globe, Haaretz, WNYC radio, The Appeal, and In These Times.

Based in western Massachusetts, he is the investigations editor at the local independent news outlet The Shoestring and has been a frequent contributor at New England Public Media. He’s also a lecturer of public discourse and journalism at Smith College, where he teaches courses on investigative reporting, data journalism, and long-form writing.

Dusty has won regional and national awards for his investigative reporting and editing, including a Publick Occurrences Award — the New England Newspaper & Press Association’s top yearly prize — for a 2024 series scrutinizing how easy it is for Massachusetts police to seize, and often keep, people’s property. His exposés on past abuses at the Clarke School for the Deaf and on corporate research agreements at Massachusetts’ flagship public university were NENPA finalists for best investigative reporting. He received a digital-writing award from the Public Media Journalists Association for his 2023 investigation of civilian complaints against the Holyoke Police Department.

In 2025, the Institute for Nonprofit News awarded The Shoestring with an Insight Award for Explanatory Journalism for a piece he edited — a deep dive into the corporate consolidation of funeral homes in western Massachusetts. That same year, he was the editor of a three-part series exploring the public health movement to address gambling addiction that won a Public Media Journalists Association award for enterprise reporting.

Dusty previously worked as a fact-checker at The Nation Magazine, a producer at WNYC radio, and as a staff writer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette newspaper. In 2018, he was one of the founding organizers of a successful campaign to organize a wall-to-wall union at the Gazette. He later worked as a member organizer with the NewsGuild helping other journalists unionize their newsrooms nationwide.

Dusty has also taught journalism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has received journalism fellowships from the New England First Amendment Coalition and Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Dusty served as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Ukraine from 2012 to 2014. A lifelong lover of learning languages, he speaks a handful of them with (widely) varying degrees of success. In recent years, he’s added the programming language R to that list.