Wudan Yan is an independent journalist whose written work appears in BuzzFeed, The California Sunday Magazine, Discover, Columbia Journalism Review, Elemental, Harper’s, High Country News, Huffington Post, Longreads, MIT Technology Review, Mongabay, Nature, National Public Radio, The New Yorker, The New York Times, OneZero, Public Radio International, and beyond.

With Jenni Gritters, Yan is the is the co-host of The Writer's Co-op, a business podcast for freelance creatives.

Over the years, her reporting has been supported by grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to investigate Southeast Asia's palm oil industry (2016); UC Berkeley’s 11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship (2016) and the Pulitzer Center (2020) to report on food supply chains; the Institute of Journalism and Natural Resources (2019) and Society of Environmental Journalists (2020) to look at the legacy of nuclear weapons development on Native American communities in the American southwest. She received Hostile Environment & First Aid Training in 2018.