Headshot by Deon Haskins, 2025

Shakkira [Sha-KY-Rah] Harris (she/her) is an experienced storyteller with an extensive background in building impactful narratives across various mediums. She’s a proficiently powerful and passionate writer, business owner, and marketing professional.

Shakkira takes pride in elevating stories to reach a broader audience while helping cultivate and sustain credibility and authenticity.

Shakkira’s written journalism can be found in The Arizona Republic, NUVO, WRTV, Medium, and The Manuscript. Her marketing expertise includes spearheading the creation of Ivy Indy magazine and consistently curating compelling news stories that elevated Ivy Tech Community College's brand and engagement.

Shakkira was a 2018 Pulliam Fellow placed in Phoenix, Arizona, where she learned from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists for the better part of a year. There, she began not only her journey as a journalist but as a social media producer. She gained experience in everything social, from real-time reporting at MAGA rallies and ICE protests to writing up trending news.

She moved back to Indianapolis in 2019 to be a Digital Content Producer at WRTV, where she helped manage the newsroom’s CMS, enhance on-air reporters’ stories digitally, and engaged in the production of growing WRTV’s digital audience. Quickly, Shakkira worked her way up to becoming a Real-Time Digital Content Editor for WRTV. Under this role, she operated as an assignment editor, breaking news reporter, and homepage editor. In 2021, Shakkira was again promoted at WRTV and took on the position of Digital Enterprise Reporter, focusing on the community, culture, and diversity beats — often dabbling in several others, such as art, entertainment, and business. Being a digital reporter means Shakkira wrote and developed stories on several platforms with a digital-first mindset, such as web articles, videos for OTT/streaming, scripts for traditional television, and social media.

In 2022, Shakkira opened her first business, Milkman’s Daughter, alongside her partner. Milkman’s Daughter is a private, mobile bartending and mixology service based in Indianapolis. Milkman’s Daughter specializes in curating craft cocktails and mocktails, elevating the bar and drink menu for various private events.

In 2023, Shakkira became the Director of Content Marketing for Ivy Tech in Indianapolis, where she enjoys discovering and thus sharing the countless stories surrounding the community-oriented campus.

Shakkira continues to freelance for publications near and far by way of Indianapolis. Community-driven journalism, literature, pop culture, food, art, race, sex, and gender relations are all topics Shakkira cares about most.

Her first published short story, “We All Have Them,” can be read in the 2018 Butler University literary magazine, The Manuscript. 

Shakkira is a proud graduate of Indiana University Indianapolis (formerly known as IUPUI), where she earned her BA in Journalism with a focus on Sports, her Minor in Literature, and where she also studied Creative Writing and American Sign Language.

Shakkira is an aspirant MBA student, sexological bodywork educator, and multi-level entrepreneur. In another season of her life, she aims to be an author.

A passionate traveler, Shakkira has explored over half of the U.S. and seven countries (and counting), seeking inspiration from every corner of the globe. She finds solace and joy in live music, which she considers her 'church,' and thrives on literature, craft cocktails, coffee, and the art of radical self-expression and love.