Chris Graves is an assistant professor of practice and a Deepe Family Chair in Depth Reporting at the College of Journalism and Mass Communications, teaching beginning and advanced reporting and writing courses and information gathering. She co-leads the college’s in-depth reporting and writing courses and has led the travel-abroad, multi-media Global Eyewitness program. She joined the college in 2020 after a 35-year career working in newspapers, TV and public radio.

Graves has spent more than seven years reporting and writing about an octuple homicide in the Appalachian foothills in southern Ohio that is the state's most complex and costly criminal investigation. A book proposal is currently under review with national publishers.

Graves has spent her career documenting human suffering and the human spirit. A word editor and a newsroom manager, she helped newsrooms "go digital' in the early days and continues to be energized by the future of local news and how technologies can deliver news to various audiences.

She’s been a reporter, line editor, assistant city editor, managing editor and newspaper columnist. She’s worked in print, TV and public radio newsrooms. She documented Minneapolis’ most murderous years in the early 1990s. While a reporter at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, she covered spree killer Andrew Cunanan, who killed fashion designer Gianni Versace in 1997. Her coverage of the child protection system was a catalyst for the state of Minnesota to change its law to allow for certain juvenile court records to be open to the media for inspection.

Her crime and justice work has been featured in documentaries, television shows, National Public Radio and referenced in numerous books and cited by former Attorney General Janet Reno as well as used by Harvard researchers.

While metro columnist at the Cincinnati Enquirer, Graves was a member of the team awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for "Seven Days of Heroin."

In 2020, while working at Minnesota Public Radio, she helped direct online coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic and the killing of George Floyd.

She has won dozens of local and state awards for her reporting work, as have the reporters she has supervised.

Graves, a first-generation college student from North Omaha, holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln.

Graves proudly serves as a member of the First Generation Nebraska Advisory Board and as faculty advisor for the college's student chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

She is the mother of two adult daughters; her oldest is studying at UNL. She lives in Omaha.