Andy Pierrotti

Andy Pierrotti is an award-winning investigative journalist and executive producer of documentaries at WANF-TV and Gray Media. During his 25-year career, including more than a decade of reporting in Atlanta, his work has focused on education, civil rights, criminal justice and government accountability.

His investigations have changed state laws, helped free people from jail, led to criminal convictions and exposed systemic failures affecting vulnerable communities.

In 2015, he was honored with a prestigious Peabody Award for “The Cost of Troubled Minds,” a documentary that uncovered a mental health crisis in Texas and exposed how the state’s lack of resources, funding and experts cost taxpayers millions of dollars each year.

His investigative series, “The Sixth,” shed light on a nationwide shortage of public defenders and the consequences for people unable to afford an attorney. The series received a 2024 duPont-Columbia Award and a Peabody nomination.

More recently, Pierrotti has focused extensively on children with disabilities and their families. His two-year “Reading Reset” investigation examined Georgia’s decades-long struggle with literacy, including challenges facing children with dyslexia and other learning disabilities. His ongoing special education reporting has documented rising complaints, school districts violating disability laws, and costly legal battles between districts and families.

Pierrotti is also a Pulitzer Center grantee. With its support, he traveled to Samoa in 2025 to film the documentary “Tragedy in Paradise,” an international reporting project examining how vaccine misinformation and distrust contributed to a 2019 measles outbreak that killed 83 people, most of them children. The project connected the lessons from Samoa to declining childhood vaccination rates and the resurgence of measles in the United States. The reporting was produced as a multipart series and documentary and earned first-place honors in documentary storytelling from the National Headliner Awards and the Association of Healthcare Journalists.

Pierrotti is a graduate of the University of South Carolina, which honored him with its Distinguished Alumni Award in 2018. He later became the first professional-in-residence at its College of Information and Communications. He has also been invited to guest lecture and teach at universities, including Elon University, Emerson College and the University of Maryland.

A longtime member of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), Pierrotti has served on its conference committee and regularly participates in the organization’s annual training and conferences. His work has also been recognized with multiple regional Emmy and Edward R. Murrow awards.