Fulbright Scholar Traces Her Roots

As an Emmy Award-winning television news executive producer, Vanessa Botelho (B.F.A. ’95) is a natural storyteller. She’s currently telling her own story in a historical memoir about Anglo-Indian identity—a story of movement, of finding a home and a place to belong.

“The story I’m writing is about who gets to call themselves American,” says Botelho, who was born in India and, at age 5, immigrated to the United States when her parents decided to pursue the American dream. “Who is an American? And what does that mean to different people? There are lots of stories being told, and all of our stories are important.”

Like many of her Anglo-Indian ancestors, Botelho felt like an outsider, even in her birthplace of Calcutta. Her parents have European ancestry—her father’s roots go back to Portugal, and her mother is of British and French descent. “Anglo-Indians were marginalized in post-colonial India,” Botelho explains. “They are not pure Indian, not pure European.”

The feeling of otherness persisted after her family settled in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where Botelho grew up in an Italian American neighborhood.

“Growing up, my friends would ask what I was. I’d say, ‘I’m Anglo-Indian,’ but no one knew what that meant,” remembers Botelho, who eventually moved with her family to Long Island. “We felt marginalized when we first immigrated. When we were kids, my sister and I wanted to go to our Italian friends’ homes to eat spaghetti; we wanted to eat what everyone else was eating so we could feel like we belonged.”

But Botelho never let those feelings hold her back. After getting her degree in communication arts at New York Tech, she spent nearly three decades at breakneck-paced television news outlets, including 12 years at ABC7NY, ABC’s flagship station. She moved up the ranks from fresh-out-of-college TV news writer to executive producer at NBC Universal. Now, as an associate professor at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York (CUNY), she serves as a Tow professor and as the director of the TV news and digital specialization, which she created two years ago.

Botelho brings her real-world TV news experience into the classroom, teaching students how to thrive in the same high-stress, deadline-driven environment. “I’m teaching them the nuts and bolts of journalism—how to report ethically, how to research, how to get good sound bites, how to deal with different personalities. The next generation of journalists needs extraordinary support and guidance. There has never been a more crucial time to be a journalist than now.”

Botelho recently earned the 2026–2027 Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award, which will take her back to India for four months. As a Fulbright Senior Scholar, she will teach video journalism to graduate students at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, where she will also conduct research for her memoir at the institute’s Centre for Memory Studies. Botelho started her research as a visiting scholar at Oxford University’s Centre for Life-Writing, where she worked alongside other authors from around the world as both mentor and mentee.

“I’m writing about the power of embracing change and finding a place to call home, which has been a thread through my entire life,” she says. “I want to educate Americans about who Anglo-Indians are and the contributions they have made—people like my family who were looking for a better life and are major success stories.”

In the memoir, she will also “pull back the curtain” on her own success story in TV news. “I’ve covered some of the biggest historical events of modern history,” says Botelho, listing many breaking news stories, including the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001; the capture of Iraqi president Sadam Hussain in 2003; the election of President Barack Obama in 2008; the killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 2011; the devastating Hurricane Sandy in 2012; and President Donald Trump’s election in 2016.

Botelho remembers that New York Tech’s television news show, LI News Tonight, was the major reason she enrolled at the university because students could broadcast on the air. She took her student experiences at New York Tech into the real world in a long and successful career, bringing it full circle to teach students of her own.

“My news career wasn’t easy,” she says. “As a minority, I had to work harder than my peers, but that didn’t stop me from pushing forward. I want my students to know that if you want something, you have every right to be in that room. I want to impart that lesson on students in India, too. I will cherish the honor of being chosen as a United States cultural ambassador as a Fulbright Senior Scholar. I’m looking forward to all of the opportunities for cross-cultural collaboration this will bring.”

By Ashley Festa