Lizzie Johnson, an alumna from MN’s class of 2011, returned a few weeks ago to her hometown, her high school, and her family to be inducted into the sixth class of the Millard North Hall of Fame. However, she also came to say her goodbyes before moving to Kyiv, Ukraine in the midst of a warzone.
Johnson is relocating to Ukraine for the next four years as a foreign correspondent for “The Washington Post.” Her role is to report on issues affecting the part of the world where she is assigned. One might feel hesitant about moving into a battlefield, but Johnson feels strongly about her decision and finds thrill in the challenge it provides.
“I’m the kind of person that’s drawn to really high-intensity stuff. I mean, clearly, I’m about to move into a warzone,” Johnson said. “I think I thrive off of being really busy and doing work that matters to me.”
This is Johnson’s fifth time in Ukraine, meaning that she is no stranger to war, even though she still hasn’t quite become accustomed to the dangers. Yet, she still cherishes the culture and people she’s met in the process, and tries to find light in a tough situation.
“There are moments where it’s really scary, where you’re under shelling all night and things are really loud,” Johnson said. “But then, the restaurants are incredible and everyone is so fashionable… and the culture is beautiful, so [both things] can exist at the same time.”
Despite experiencing the change of moving to another country, for Johnson, coming back to the U.S. has also been unexpected. Even though she lived in the U.S. for the majority of her life, she still experiences a certain culture shock, especially when visiting her high school during football season.
“I went to the Millard North football game, which was so American of all American experiences, and they played this siren noise during halftime. I was like, ‘Oh, that sounds like an air-raid siren,’ and if that were happening in Ukraine, everyone would start running for the bomb shelters. But cheerleaders are across the fields and kids are laughing,” Johnson said. “You don’t realize what a privilege that is until you don’t have it.”
Journalism adviser Sarah Crotzer had Johnson as a student throughout her high school career and worked closely with her. The two spent a lot of time together, especially when Johnson was Editor-In-Chief of both the newspaper and yearbook.
“Lizzie had this bell on her backpack, and I could always hear her coming down the hallway,” Crotzer said. “I was always reassured when I heard that bell, because I knew that Lizzie was going to take charge and help me figure things out.”
Although Crotzer knew Johnson was destined for big things, not every adult in her life took her and her dreams seriously.
“When I was a little girl growing up in Nebraska, being like, ‘I want to be a foreign correspondent,’ a lot of people didn’t take me seriously, and to get that opportunity to see a different culture, and to cover stories that really matter?” Johnson said, “I think the wonderful thing about journalism is that when you do these accountability pieces, you can show the reality of someone’s situation, you can spur change.”
After high school, Johnson graduated from the University of Missouri with a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism and a minor in Spanish, which she put to use during an internship in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Spanish teacher and World Language department head Shaun Hoover was Johnson’s Spanish teacher. He was elated to receive her invitation to the Hall of Fame as the youngest inductee, and wasn’t surprised that Johnson went on to do amazing things.
“This is pretty cool to see her get recognized [in the hall of fame], especially in a profession that’s very judged at this moment,” Hoover said.
After completing many internships at locations like the “Chicago Tribune,” “Omaha World Herald,” and the “Dallas Morning News,” Johnson was offered a job at the “San Francisco Chronicle.”
Starting out, she covered City Hall in California for two years. She worked closely with politicians and reported on political issues that directly affected California. Needing a breath of fresh air and a change in environment, Johnson transferred to the GA, or general assignment desk, and dabbled in many different topics before finally settling on her calling: wildfires.
Johnson had spent a large portion of her time reporting on the 2018 wildfires in California. In order to get a first-person perspective, Johnson put herself on the front lines of the deadliest wildfire in California and United States history. Afterwards, she wrote a book about her experience and the people she had met along the way.
Johnson’s book, “Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire,” was published in 2021, and after the substantial success of her novel, the rights were sold to Blumhouse Productions (which includes big-name producers like Jamie Lee Curtis and Jason Blum) to create a movie.
With Johnson working as an executive producer on her movie, she worked alongside other producers to not only create an imaginative movie but also to stay true to the novel’s gravity and hard-hitting reality of what happened in Paradise, California.
“[Jamie Lee Curtis] had such a big heart, and knows that the story requires a lot of substantivity, because it’s not just a movie. It was the worst day of a lot of people’s lives,” Johnson said.
The core of the movie was taken from an excerpt in Paradise, where Johnson discovered a bus driver by the name of Kevin McKay (portrayed by Matthew McConaughey on screen). McKay responded to an emergency call regarding 22 elementary students who needed rescuing.
McKay rescued the students and their teacher, Mary Ludwig (played by America Ferrera), and drove 30 miles to safety on a road engulfed in flames on both sides. The movie, The Lost Bus, premiered on September 5, 2025, at the Toronto International Film Festival and will be released globally on October 3, 2025, on Apple TV+.
After her success with her first book, Johnson isn’t quite sure what her next project will turn out to be. She’s on the lookout for what will motivate her to pick up her pencil.
“I feel like there’s probably a second book in Ukraine somewhere,” Johnson said. “I don’t want to [write another book] just for the sake of doing it. It has to be something that I can’t stop thinking about. Thinking about it while eating dinner, when I’m falling asleep at night, and then I wake up thinking about it.”
Now, Johnson is eight hours ahead of CST, and is oceans and a continent away. But based on her previous work, Johnson focuses on impactful and emotional work, where she tells the stories of people.
“I think there’s so much that we don’t have control over in our lives, and sometimes it feels like things are just happening to us, especially nowadays, and so the ability to do a little bit of good, I think that’s what keeps you going,” Johnson said.