Kat Lonsdorf
Kat Lonsdorf is a Middle East reporter currently based in Tel Aviv.
Originally from a small town in Wisconsin, Kat attended Occidental College in Los Angeles where she majored in Diplomacy and World Affairs. She joined NPR in 2016 after earning her Masters in Journalism from Medill at Northwestern University.
Lonsdorf has produced and reported for NPR around the world, including in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Japan, Kenya, Ukraine, Georgia, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories. In 2020, she was NPR's Above the Fray Fellow, reporting out a series of stories looking at clean up and recovery efforts in Fukushima, Japan after the nuclear disaster in 2011. That series made her a finalist for the Livingston Award for international reporting. She's also won both a Gracie and an Edward R Murrow award for her work.
Before she came to NPR, she was a full-time bartender in downtown Los Angeles, and also hosted and produced an education travel video series for kids called Project Explorer where she filmed in 14 countries across five continents. Lonsdorf has lived in both Japan and Jordan, and speaks Japanese and conversational Arabic. She's currently trying to learn Hebrew in the evenings. [Copyright 2025 NPR]
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As artificial intelligence becomes more advanced and common, it's hard to know what's real or not, complicating the search for Nancy Guthrie, according to law enforcement. But just how difficult is it? -
A professional airplane enthusiast has been tracking the federally chartered deportation flights out of the Minneapolis airport as DHS sends immigration detainees to other states and, eventually, other countries. -
South Minneapolis has been at the center of multiple tragedies, from the murder of George Floyd to the killing of Renee Macklin Good. Locals say the events have brought them closer and helped them organize. -
Brass Solidarity was formed after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in 2020. Now, the band is playing at protests against federal immigration enforcement, in an effort to bring joy to residents and break potential tension. -
The move comes after President Trump again threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to control ongoing protests over the immigration enforcement surge in Minneapolis. -
As President Trump began a pattern of deploying the National Guard to democratic-led cities, several Democratic attorneys general and their staffs worked to coordinate their fight against the deployments – and, ultimately, they won. -
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against President Trump on Tuesday, refusing to reinstate, for now, Trump's ability to send National Guard troops into the state of Illinois over the objections of the governor. -
A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. has ruled that National Guard troops can remain in the city for now. That decision comes after a different federal appeals court ruled that troops must leave Los Angeles earlier this week. -
In the latest in a series of legal setbacks for Trump's deployments, a judge ruled the administration must end its deployment to Los Angeles and return control of National Guard troops to California. -
Beckstrom, 20, was an Army specialist from Summersville, W.Va. She entered the service in 2023. President Trump said the second Guard member who was shot, Andrew Wolfe, "is fighting for his life."
