Dustin Patar is a freelance multimedia journalist and reporter for Nunatsiaq News, the newspaper of record in Nunavut, Canada.
Born in San Francisco, California and raised across the United States and Canada, Dustin often found himself connecting with outliers, the people and places that, more often than not, are passed by. As a journalist, he’s still drawn to these stories—often asking himself whose voice is missing, why and how can he change that.
Aside from the Canadian Arctic, Dustin’s work has taken him from the depths of the Grand Canyon to the shores of West Africa. His work and projects he’s contributed to have been published by The Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Oregonian, Motherboard, CBC Indigenous, Hakai Magazine and most recently, Nunatsiaq News which also regularly publishes his work in Inuktitut.
Dustin holds a master’s degree from the University of British Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. There he participated in one of Canada’s only Indigenous Reporting programs, was selected to attend a military journalism workshop hosted by the University of Calgary and was a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation’s 2018 Student Journalism Award.
While he was at UBC, Dustin was also chosen as one of 10 Global Reporting Program Fellows, where he was part of a team sent to Senegal and The Gambia to report on the local impact of the international fishmeal industry.
In 2019, Dustin was named a Carnegie-Knight News21 Fellow, where he produced, directed and edited an episode of the EPPY award-winning documentary series, State of Emergency, about natural disaster recovery in the United States.
Dustin’s work also extends to audio, having helped produced episodes of podcasts for both News21 and Hakai Magazine. His photography work, which is often published alongside his written stories, was also recognized at the 2017 Capture Photography Festival in Vancouver, British Columbia.
With a knack for jumping into the deep end and the know-how to climb out, no project is too ambitious and no story too demanding. So if you’ve got ideas that you think he might be interested in, just send them over, he is.
