Theresa Blackwell is a reporter in the Clearwater office of the St. Petersburg Times.

Once a federal manager in the General Services Administration in Washington, D.C., she was a freelance photojournalist for the Washington Post, the Associated Press, the St. Petersburg Times and other newspapers before joining the staff of the Times in 2002.

In recent years, she has written about numerous projects like ballfields that Pinellas County proposed in the Brooker Creek Preserve, an 8,300-acre preserve set aside for wildlife and passive recreation. And on July 3, 2007, she broke a story about Pinellas County's hasty purchase of a flood-prone lot owned by the Pinellas County Property Appraiser for nearly four times the value the appraiser's own office had given it for tax purposes in 2006.

Born in Portchester, N.Y., she spent her early years in California, then grew up swinging through the trees of five acres in Mobile, Ala. Her education includes a bachelor's degree in psychology with an art minor, a post-graduate two-year degree in photography and additional college courses in journalism.

Phone: (727) 445-4170

E-mail: tblackwell@tampabay.com