Fellows & Editors

Louise Lief

Trip:: TBD
Affiliation:: International Reporting Project (IRP)
Year:: 2000

Louise Lief was deputy director of the International Reporting Project from 1998 to 2012.

Before joining IRP, 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.

Stories

Big Kingdom, Small Window

by Louise Lief | December 17, 2012

During the eight years I organized overseas trips for US news editors at the International Reporting Project, I had a rule of thumb that served me well—if a country has...
Fighting AIDS in Obama’s Ancestral Land

by Louise Lief | November 29, 2012

World AIDS Day is approaching, and it's time, once again, for an accounting. In the roughly 30 years since the disease was recognized, more than 25 million (pdf) have died from...
Obama Step-Grandma on Women’s Rights

by Louise Lief | September 28, 2012

No visit to Kenya is complete without calling on Sarah Obama, President Obama's remarkably sharp 90-year-old step-grandmother, the woman who raised his father, Barack Obama Sr. Since the 2008 U.S. presidential...