MFIA Welcomes 2025–26 Student Directors

The Media Freedom and Information Access (MFIA) Clinic announced next year’s student directors: Andrea DenHoed ’27, Raymond Perez ’26, and Anna Selbrede ’26.

The incoming directors each found their own path to law school. Perez grew up moving throughout the country, living in Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, New York City, and Pennsylvania before settling in Baltimore for college,” Perez said. That experience will motivate his work at MFIA, he said. 

“Growing up in the South and North led me to appreciate the value of different perspectives, open exchange, and free dialogue, which is why I commit to uphold these values at the clinic,” he said.

Selbrede also noted the impact of her upbringing on her academic career. 

“My father was in the Navy, so I grew up in a combination of Maryland, Virginia, and Hawaii,” she said. “Maryland is particularly supportive of student representation and participation, which pushed me to get involved in education policy and law throughout high school.”

DenHoed hails from Aurora, Colorado, outside of Denver. She theorized that her passion for the law developed out of her high school extracurricular activities. 

“My siblings and I were homeschooled, and I competed in speech and debate during my high school years, which is maybe where the seed of my law career was planted,” DenHoed said.

Selbrede, given her early interest in education law and policy, started on her application immediately after she graduated college. She then lived in Madrid and Cádiz, Spain for two months, “taking Spanish classes during the day and often studying for the LSAT at night,” she said.

Selbrede’s work also reflected her passion for the law, particularly around education. 

“During the year before law school I was a paralegal in the Educational Opportunities Section of the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division,” she said. “We worked on behalf of the government to bring school systems into compliance with civil rights law, which sparked my interest in government and structural reform litigation.”

Perez said that “I’ve wanted to be a lawyer since I was a kid.” He graduated from Johns Hopkins with a degree in international studies and financial economics at started law school that fall.

During the intervening summer Perez traveled to Indonesia with the State Department, an experience that reinforced the values that he shares with the clinic. 

“The unique, syncretic culture of Indonesia reinforced in my ethos a few ideas,” Perez said. “(1) openness and community are key to learning; (2) diversity is above all a strength; (3) given the history (and perhaps future) of Indonesian defamation law, free expression is the bedrock of free societies.”

DenHoed explored a career in journalism before law school. After studying at the University of Oklahoma and then Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, she received her master’s degree from the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU. DenHoed found an internship at The New Yorker and stayed.

“I ended up working there for almost a decade, mostly copy editing but also doing some writing,” she said.

DenHoed then decided to try more on-the-ground reporting. “I moved back to Oklahoma and took a job as the managing editor of a tiny nonprofit news outlet in Oklahoma City right before COVID hit. I lived in Oklahoma for three years before coming to Yale.”

Despite their distinct paths, each of the incoming directors has felt that the law was their calling. “More fundamentally, practicing law is how I can best use my skills in logical reasoning to effect change in the world,” Perez said.

DenHoed noted her own enduring interest in the law. 

“The idea that I might someday attend law school had always been in the back of my mind,” she said. “While I was in the journalism world, I’d often end up working on stories where lawyers were involved, and I always thought that the role they played as advocates was extremely appealing.”

Selbrede enjoys the deep analysis and advocacy for government efficiency that a legal career can offer. 

“I found that those two interests fit together when I organized three amicus briefs over three years of litigation defending my Maryland county’s student school board member position,” she said.

“I had served in the role [of student school board member] as a high schooler, and I appreciated the ability of our amicus brief to provide color to the position and further prove as a legal matter that it was constitutional,” Selbrede said. “My goal as a lawyer is to fulfill a similar role: litigating to improve or defend our government institutions.”

After law school, DenHoed also imagines a particular role for herself. 

“I could see myself working in media law, largely thanks to my experiences in MFIA,” she details. “Media and First Amendment issues are at the center of so many important and interesting issues today.”

The incoming student directors also enjoy wide-ranging passions and hobbies outside of law school. 

Perez hopes to visit all 1,223 UNESCO World Heritage Sites and practices stand-up comedy. DenHoed likes to spend time with her two dogs. “[They] eat up a lot of my spare time outside of law school,” she said. “Thankfully, I enjoy going on walks, and they give me an excuse to do that every day.”

Selbrede likes to spend time with family. As a triplet, she shares a frequently asked question: “No, we do not have the same career paths — my sister is an electrical engineer, and my brother is a writer,” she said. “And yes, we are very close!”