Donna Chisholm is an Auckland-based writer and investigative journalist with more than 40 years’ experience in the media, covering science, health, social issues and crime.
She has written for leading magazines and newspapers including the NZ Listener, North & South, Metro, the Sunday Star-Times and the Auckland Star, and is widely respected in health and scientific research communities for her ability to distil complex information and communicate it to a lay audience in a readily accessible form.
Donna has won dozens of media awards for her work, including numerous Qantas/Canon Media awards for magazine feature writing in crime/justice, health, human relations, business and general fields. She’s a three-time winner of the Newspaper/Magazine Feature Writer of the Year Award in the Qantas/Canon Media Awards; she’s also won the Magazine Publishers Association Current Affairs Journalist of the Year Award three times. She was the inaugural winner of the NIB Health Journalism Scholarship in 2016; at the Voyager Media Awards in 2017, she won the Outstanding Achievement Award for her contribution to journalism.
In 2009, a television movie, Until Proven Innocent, was released that focused on her investigation for the Sunday Star-Times in the 1990s, which helped to free David Dougherty from prison after he was wrongly convicted of the abduction of an 11-year-old girl. She is also the author of From the Heart, the biography of Sir Brian Barratt-Boyes, published in 1987.
