About.

Shelby Benkard Rose was born on April 1, 1993, in Long Island, New York. Her mother, Amy Conklin, was from Albany; her father, James Rose, is from Locust Valley. Shelby was raised by her mother: first in New York, then outside Philadelphia, and later in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Shelby grew up speaking French and learned Parisian French as a young child. She attended Montessori school through fourth grade, then moved with her mother to Williamsburg. She later graduated from Lafayette High School.

Shelby began riding horses at sixteen months old and has remained a competitive horseback rider throughout her life. In 2010, she was Children’s Hunter Champion and Children’s Equitation Champion for the Capital Horse Shows Association (CHSA), riding Jill Tewksbury’s Momento.

At the University of Virginia, Shelby began studying Arabic and went to Amman, Jordan, on a study-abroad program. The experience changed the direction of her life. During the summer after her third year, she moved to Nablus in the West Bank, traveled widely through the region, and wrote a personal blog called A Tribute to the Fire Mountain.

An encounter with an incident that was misreported through a national news outlet raised a question that stayed with her: How can a claim become part of the public record before it has been adequately checked?

After returning to Virginia, Shelby finished her degree and worked with CBS 19 in Charlottesville as a reporter, editor, intern, photographer, and producer. She followed the Hannah Graham case closely and covered Donald Trump in Virginia during the early 2014–15 campaign.

She then joined CNN in New York, first as a media coordinator and later as a production assistant on Erin Burnett OutFront. She moved to CNN International, spending two years in Atlanta and working across television, digital, international news, and live production. Her work included producing the CNN International documentary Welcome to Wakaliwood, reporting from the field on the opioid crisis, and producing visual and digital stories about art, war, and culture.

After CNN International, Shelby worked with Stephen Collinson at CNN Politics on the former international newsletter Meanwhile in America. She later left CNN full-time for Tulane University Law School while continuing to write and produce for CNN domestic television, including work for anchors such as Smerconish, Fareed Zakaria, Erin Burnett, Wolf Blitzer, Fredricka Whitfield, Pamela Brown, and Dana Bash.

At Tulane, Shelby worked in the First Amendment Clinic and researched media, speech, public records, and the law. After graduating, she studied art business at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, where her work intersected with art, technology, ownership, and cultural property. Those experiences led her to found Aletheia, a fact-based intelligence company built around the need to make claims, evidence, and context easier to examine.

Shelby currently lives in Manhattan.