When Angela Fitzgerald Ward PhDx’27 arrived in Madison in 2015, she had no family nearby, no friend group waiting for her, and no clear sense of where she fit. So she started looking. “It literally felt like a scavenger hunt,” she says.
The Maryland native moved to Wisconsin for a new job and quickly realized she would have to build community from scratch. She searched for familiar touchstones, followed tips from new connections, and kept going wherever a conversation led. “I would just go places, meet people, and figure out where I felt comfortable until I cultivated a network,” she says.
Eventually she found it. What she did not expect was that this same journey would lead her in front of the camera for PBS Wisconsin, where she became the host of Wisconsin Life, telling stories of people across the state.
More than a decade later, Fitzgerald Ward still describes herself as a “Wisconsinite by accident.” She originally thought she was moving to California for a job, only to learn after accepting that she was being sent to Madison instead. “I was like, ‘Where is that?’ ” she recalls, laughing.
Today, she works in institutional effectiveness at Madison College, using data to understand student outcomes, and she’s a doctoral candidate at UW–Madison’s School of Human Ecology, where she studies how Black college students experience belonging and build community in higher education. She connects that work directly to her own experience of learning how to enter unfamiliar spaces with confidence. A former shy kid and self-described introvert, she remembers how much it mattered when people made room for her instead of overlooking her. “I appreciated when people picked up on that and wanted to make me feel safe and welcome,” she says. That awareness now shapes her work on camera.
On Wisconsin Life, she travels across the state meeting artists, entrepreneurs, farmers, and community members whose work often begins small and grows through connection. Her goal is not to force stories out of people but to create conditions where they feel ready to tell them. “I’ve been told I do a good job at making people feel comfortable,” she says. “Because they feel comfortable, they want to open up.”
One story that stayed with her featured a retired welder who turned his yard into “Jurustic Park,” a space filled with large scrap-metal sculptures that became a gathering place for neighbors. It reflected the kind of nontraditional community-building she sees across Wisconsin.
That idea shaped Why Race Matters, the award-winning PBS Wisconsin series she created in 2020 during a national reckoning on race. It grew into a five-season project centering Black voices and experiences across the state and reinforcing her belief that the people closest to a challenge are often closest to solutions. “I really want to position student voices as the solution-bringers to the issues that directly impact them,” she says.
Her doctoral work examines what signals belonging for students, what signals exclusion, and how people create community when institutions fall short. Whether she is interviewing a community member, studying students, or telling stories across Wisconsin, Fitzgerald Ward keeps returning to the same question: What helps people feel that they belong? For someone who once arrived without a network of her own, that question has become both her work and the way she moves through the world. “There are great things already here,” she says. “And there’s still work to be done.”
