Dreier grew up in
San Francisco and graduated from
Wesleyan University. Her work has been collected in several anthologies, including
The Best American Newspaper Narratives and, in 2019,
The Best American Magazine Writing.
The Associated Press Dreier joined The
Associated Press as a politics reporter in
Sacramento and later covered the business of gambling from
Las Vegas. She was the AP's Venezuela correspondent for five years, moving to Caracas in 2013 amid a
nationwide protest movement. She told the story of the country's unraveling from inside prisons, hospitals and factories. Her “Venezuela Undone” series illustrated the country's social and economic collapse through accounts of ordinary citizens struggling to survive. Following the
narcosobrinos affair, which saw president
Nicolás Maduro's nephews arrested in the United States for drug trafficking, Dreier was detained by
SEBIN secret police agents in
Barinas, Venezuela. The agents threatened her during a recorded interrogation, saying they would behead her like
ISIL did to
James Foley. They also said that they would let her go for a kiss. Finally, agents said that they wanted to force the United States to exchange Maduro's nephews for Dreier, accusing her of being a spy and sabotaging the Venezuelan economy. A piece in the
Columbia Journalism Review highlighted Dreier's work translating the Venezuela crisis for foreign readers. "Dreier has helped the rest of us understand how, why and what, exactly, is taking place in the country. She’s also gained a huge following on social media, where readers catch a glimpse into everyday life there—the quirky, surprising and alarming—sometimes from the window of her apartment," it said.
ProPublica In 2017, Dreier joined
ProPublica as a reporter covering immigration. There, she wrote a series of investigative magazine features about the gang MS-13. One story showed that the FBI was using teenagers as gang informants, then turning them over to be locked up with the same gang leaders they had informed on. She spent more than a year embedded on Long Island with members of the MS-13 gang. She told the Longform Podcast, “You can’t come up with a good story idea in the office. I’ve never had a good idea that I just came up with out of thin air. It always comes from being on the ground.”
The Washington Post Dreier worked for three years at
The Washington Post. She reported on topics including policing, mental illness and federal disaster aid. In response to her reporting on inequities in disaster aid programs,
FEMA reversed a policy that had shut out tens of thousands of Black disaster survivors living on
heirs property. She spent weeks in a California FEMA trailer camp for a story. Esquire said, “Read the whole thing. Read it before you start reading about what’s going on in the Congress, because all you need to know about that can be found in an empty trailer park at the edge of the world.”
The New York Times Dreier became a staff writer at
The New York Times in 2022. She reported on a shadow work force of migrant children working dangerous jobs across the United States. During her research for the project, she interviewed more than 500 working migrant children. The series was called “the most recognized piece of global journalism” of 2024. In 2024, Dreier served as commencement speaker for the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. ==Awards==