Jamie Kalven is a writer and the founding executive director of the Invisible Institute. He is the author of Working With Available Light: A Family’s World After Violence and the editor of A Worthy Tradition: Freedom of Speech in America by his father, Harry Kalven, Jr.
Beginning in the mid-1990s, he served as a consultant to public housing resident councils—first at the Stateway Gardens development and later at the Henry Horner Homes. At Stateway Gardens, he established a program of “grassroots public works” to create employment alternatives for gang members and ex-offenders. And he launched a human rights reporting project called The View From The Ground.
Kalven was the plaintiff in Kalven v. Chicago (2014), in which the Illinois appellate court ruled that documents bearing on allegations of police misconduct are public information. His reporting in Slate in 2015 first brought the police shooting of Laquan McDonald to public attention; and he co-produced 16 Shots, an Emmy-winning documentary on the McDonald case. In 2016, he published a series titled “Code of Silence” in The Intercept that exposed the criminal activities of a team of corrupt Chicago officers and has contributed to the exonerations of 171 individuals.
Among the national awards he has received are the 2016 Ridenhour Courage Prize, the 2017 Hillman Prize for Web Journalism, and the 2021 I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence.