Jose Antonio Vargas
Founder and CEO, Define American; Journalist; Filmmaker
Jose Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, filmmaker, and voice for the human rights of immigrants. He is founder and CEO of Define American, a media and culture nonprofit fighting injustice and anti-immigrant hate through storytelling. Vargas produced and directed the 2013 documentary feature film, Documented, about his own undocumented experience, which he had first written about in the New York Times Magazine in 2011 and then in a TIME magazine cover story. He produced and directed White People, an Emmy-nominated MTV special about being young and white in contemporary America. An advisory board member of TheDream.US, Vargas’s memoir, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, will be published fall 2018.
Previously
While Congress looks less and less likely to take on any meaningful move on comprehensive immigration reform, hundreds of thousands of people live in limbo every day. Many of...
What does it mean to be American, and how is that story best told and understood? New York Times columnist David Brooks sits down with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and un...
For our annual signature event in the Benedict Music Tent, the 2018 Aspen Ideas Festival hosts former secretary of state John Kerry in a candid conversation about geopolitics...
Activist Dolores Huerta, recipient of the 2012 Presidential Medal of Freedom, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, founder of the nonprofit media and cul...
Journalists Michele Norris, Jose Antonio Vargas, and Amar Bakshi have all worked to create global megaphones for sharing experiences and stories that too often go unnoticed. N...
Debating immigration is a perennial favorite in presidential elections, perhaps never more so than in 2016, when border walls and banning Muslims push the boundaries of what p...
We’ve selected some of the brightest minds on the Ideas Festival stage to participate in an afternoon of Big Ideas for young people: an interactive afternoon that will include...