Emilia Newell Ferrara was born in Washington, D.C., grew up in Woodland Normanstone, and attended the National Cathedral School for girls. She graduated Cum Laude from Georgetown University where she majored in English, minored in Philosophy and published both op-ed articles and short fiction stories. Her senior year, she completed an experimental short-fiction collection, “Not Afternoon Tea, And Other Short Stories”, which was published by Georgetown University and awarded Honors.
During college, Ferrara interned as a journalist for a diverse group of publications around the country. Her assignments spanned covering from politics for The Denver Post to covering music for CosmoGirl. She earned her masters from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and continued to live in New York working for T: The New York Times Style Magazine and The New York Observer. While living in New York, her observations and explorations of the beauty, fashion and magazine industries became the foundation for Mag World, a collection of nonfiction essays exploring the health and future of these three industries.
Ferrara moved back to Washington, D.C. to continue her book research at The Library of Congress while also working for Washingtonian. Her insights on the magazine industry and her knack for finding the beating heart of a brand allowed her to aid then Editor-In-Chief Garrett Graff in the magazine’s redesign.
As she continued to write her first book, she began teaching at Beauvoir: The National Cathedral Elementary School. The way the media influenced her students demonstrated a need for a curriculum teaching children of all ages how to have a healthy relationship with media and technology. After working as an Associate Teacher in first and second grade, she was invited to design her own curriculum, called Media Nutrition. Her curriculum has been featured in lower, middle and high schools across all quadrants of Washington, D.C.
Before Emilia Ferrara’s journalism career, she studied ballet with Mary Day and danced for ten years at The Washington School of Ballet. She has performed with The Washington Ballet, American Ballet Theater and The Ballet National de Marseille Roland Petit at The Kennedy Center. Ferrara became the Washington Ballet’s first Webre Fellow for Dance Direction and Management where she contributed dramaturgy for Cinderella and The Nutcracker, led children’s rehearsals and volunteered in the community outreach program Dance D.C. In 2019, she was elected to serve on The Washington School of Ballet’s 75th Anniversary Planning Committee.
Ferrara continues to volunteer in D.C. at Holy Trinity Catholic Church. In 2019, she was appointed by Mayor Muriel Bowser as D.C. Commissioner of Fashion Arts & Events. She is the founder of Capitally Magazine, an online publication that covered sustainable fashion, clean beauty and wellness. She has served as an Adjunct Lecturer at Georgetown University where she taught “Fashion Journalism” and where she also served as a judge for the The Edward B. Bunn Award for Journalistic Excellence. In 2016, Georgetown English Department’s Honors Thesis Prize was renamed in her honor. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for The Washington Ballet and is a former board member of the D.C. Sustainable Fashion Collective. She is an active member of Kappa Kappa Gamma and leads a committee for her local chapter of The Daughters of The American Revolution. Ferrara freelances as an editor, writer and brand consultant, continuing to add to her past print and online articles published in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, The Denver Post, The New York Observer, The Albany Times Union, The Greenpoint Gazette, Washingtonian Magazine, CosmoGirl!, BuzzFeed, and more.
She currently lives in Georgetown with her poodle, Tino.
Holy Trinity’s St. Ignatius Chapel is the oldest place of Catholic worship in Washington, D.C.
by Katty Huertas