Liz Shepherd is an award-winning reporter and editor for The Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber, currently working part-time on the paper. Her work as an arts reporter includes interviewing Island creatives, but in this interview, we turn the table and talk with Liz about her creative life and her views about creative living on Vashon.

Liz has won 26 awards in multiple categories for her journalism — from investigative journalism to editorial writing to arts coverage — from the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association’s Better Newspaper Contest. These have included top awards for General Excellence in 2022 and News Writer of the Year in 2024.

Liz also spent more than 20 years working for film arts enterprises and engaging young people in events and learning experiences that celebrated global culture. Her work for Northwest Film Forum in Seattle from 2005 to 2020 included directing the annual Children’s Film Festival Seattle, the West Coast’s largest annual competitive festival of its kind. 

She oversaw touring programs of the festival, which traveled to such locations as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater,  and many other prestigious venues. Her contribution to a highly specialized field was recognized through numerous invitations to participate as a speaker, juror or panel member at festivals, symposiums, and summits throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and the Middle East. 

Before arriving in Seattle, she was the director of the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival and the editor of Chicago Artists News — a monthly journal published by the Chicago Artist’s Coalition. 

She is the proud mother of grown twins, Ellie and Isaac Hughes, who were born in 1999 and raised on Vashon Island. Liz and her husband, Tom, moved to the island in 1997.