Join us for the next episode of our alum chat webinar series! Austrian student alum Lilly Maier will join us on Zoom to talk about her Fulbright experience and offer advice for future program participants seeking to go to the US. The community is invited to also take part in the Q&A session at the end of the webinar.
Join us on Zoom as alum Lilly Maier shares her Fulbright experience.
Lilly Maier is a historian and freelance journalist. Originally from Europe, she switches between writing in English and German.
From 2015 to 2017, Lilly lived in New York, where she was a Fulbright grantee attending the Magazine Journalism program at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism School at New York University. She received an MA from NYU in December 2016. Lilly also previously studied history at the University of Munich and journalism at American University in Washington, DC. Currently, Lilly is a doctoral candidate at the University of Munich, where she writes about female rescuers of Jews during the Shoah.
In 2018, Lilly published Arthur und Lilly, the biography of a Holocaust survivor who—as a boy in the 1930s—used to live in the same Viennese apartment that she moved to as a child in the 1990s. The book was published in German, and Lilly is currently working on an English translation (see English-subtitled book trailer here). In 2021, she published her book Auf Wiedersehen, Kinder!, the biography of Austrian educator Ernst Papanek, who rescued hundreds of children during WW2.
During the US presidential election, Lilly blogged from a New York perspective (Lady Liberty Votes), produced the NYU Election Night Newscast, worked in the Washington bureau of the Columbus Dispatch, and wrote for the Forward, a Jewish daily based in New York.
In 2013, she interned at PolitiFact.com, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking site in Washington, DC. An article she wrote about an Obamacare chain email was PolitiFact’s second most read article of the year and shared over 50,000 times on Facebook.
Right now, Lilly is writing for the German news magazine FOCUS Online as well as Die Stadtspionin (“Cityspottergirl”). In spring 2015, her first book was published: Mach’s einfach!, a guide to the vibrant do-it-yourself scene in Vienna.
© Sophia Lindsey
In the past, Lilly has written for a number of US, German, and Austrian magazines and newspapers, including Quartz, Bedford+Bowery, The Columbus Dispatch, The Huffington Post, News, Presse and Kurier.
In 2007, Lilly founded a bimonthly European youth magazine, Schnipsel (“papercuts”), which was awarded funding by the European Union and won first prize in the German magazine Spiegel’s prestigious school magazine contest.
Besides writing, Lilly has a deep passion for history. For her thesis “Life After the Kindertransport,” Lilly interviewed a dozen Holocaust survivors around the United States and was subsequently awarded with the University of Munich’s “Prize for Outstanding Student Research.” She also works as a guide at the Concentration Camp Memorial Site in Dachau and regularly gives talks about the Kindertransport, a unique rescue effort to save 10,000 Jewish children during the Holocaust.
Don’t miss out on this exciting interview!
About the alum chat webinar series: This webinar series is an initiative to feature notable Fulbright Austria alums who continue to make a positive impact beyond their Fulbright Austria experience. In turn, we hope our alums’ accomplishments, accounts, and expertise will inspire other members of our community as they strive to achieve their own aspirations.