• About The IRP
• Staff
• Louise Lief

Louise Lief

Louise Lief has been deputy director of the International Reporting Project since the program was founded in 1998.

Previously she was a senior editor at U.S. News and World Report, where she worked for 10 years, primarily covering the State Department and foreign affairs community in Washington. Her duties included overseas reporting for the magazine in Central Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Before joining the magazine in 1987, she lived in Paris where she was an associate producer/researcher for the CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes,” developing programs and covering events in Africa, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. While in Paris she also worked as a stringer for TIME, then for Newsweek, and was a contributor to The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and the Boston Globe Magazine.

Prior to working in Paris she was a Cairo-based stringer for The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and the Voice of America. Together with a team of U.S. News reporters, she was awarded the 1994 National Press Club Edwin P. Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence and the 1990 Hallie and Whit Burnett Award for Best General Magazine Article on Foreign Affairs. In 1982 she was awarded a Journalists in Europe Fellowship. In the late 1970’s, she received a U.S. Office of Education grant to study Arabic at the Bourguiba Language Institute in Tunis, and an ITT International Fellowship to pursue Arabic language studies at the American University in Cairo. She graduated cum laude from Yale University with a degree in French and North African Studies, and received a Certificate of Arabic Language Studies from the American University in Cairo. She speaks French, Arabic, Hebrew and Spanish.