Ziva Branstetter has led award-winning teams of journalists in Tulsa and national newsrooms for more than three decades. Investigations she has managed, edited, and helped lead have won or been named finalists for more than 15 national and international awards.

For the past three years, Ziva has led a team of investigative reporters at ProPublica, a national nonprofit newsroom. Her team’s yearlong “Life of the Mother” investigation exposed the impact of state abortion bans and received the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in May 2025.

The groundbreaking investigation documented the deaths of five pregnant women in Texas and Georgia who couldn’t access timely emergency reproductive medical care. “Life of the Mother” received widespread national coverage and sparked a national conversation about the deadly risks of state abortion bans.

She also led an investigation at ProPublica that exposed how one of the world’s largest medical device manufacturers, Philips, concealed complaints about its dangerous breathing machines from the FDA and the public. The investigation into Philips’ breathing machines, which won multiple awards including a George Polk award, ended with an agreement between the company and federal regulators to cease all U.S. sales of the machines. 

Before joining ProPublica, she served as the corporate accountability editor at The Washington Post for four years, leading a new investigative team in the newspaper’s financial section. 

An investigation she edited on a popular baby sleeper that was developed without medical safety tests and recalled after a series of infant deaths resulted in the resignation of the head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. A story she edited on cocoa harvested by children spurred an agreement between Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso to stop the importation of child laborers to harvest cocoa beans.

Branstetter was also the Post’s lead editor on the Pandora Papers investigation with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists on the hidden flow of money and assets used by the world’s elites. The largest collaboration in journalism history, the investigation eventually included more than 60 Post journalists and created wide impact, from prompting two U.S. museums to announce plans to return stolen Cambodian antiquities to inspiring a proposed law cracking down on key players in the U.S. offshore financial system. 

Before The Post, Branstetter spent 18 months as an editor at Reveal, where her team broke important stories on family separation and Tesla’s workplace safety record.

In 2015, she co-founded The Frontier, an independent investigative newsroom in Tulsa. At The Frontier, she reported and edited investigations into deaths in the Tulsa Jail and the practice of “buying rank,” in which some Tulsa police officers paid superiors to retire early.

She worked as an editor and reporter for more than 20 years at the Tulsa World, leading the newsroom’s largest team as city editor as well as leading a seven-member investigative team. She covered the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the deadly 2011 Joplin tornado, and specialized in death penalty reporting. 

An investigation she led, along with reporting partner Dylan Goforth, into the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office resulted in the indictment and resignation of Stanley Glanz, the county’s seven-term sheriff. 

After witnessing a botched execution in 2014, she and reporting partner Cary Aspinwall investigated Oklahoma’s flawed death penalty system. Their series was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting in 2015. 

In addition to her work as a journalist, Branstetter has served on the boards of nonprofit organizations including Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc., Freedom of Information Oklahoma, Inc., and the Tulsa Press Club. She is a member of the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame (2019) and the Oklahoma State University College of Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame (2015). She is also a graduate of Leadership Oklahoma and Leadership Tulsa. 

Branstetter has been married to her husband, Doug Branstetter, for 36 years. They have two grown sons, Parker (29) and Jordan (34), and one grandson, Xander (6). She is a proud graduate of Oklahoma State University and a native of Fayetteville, Ark.