Alissa Johannsen Rubin
Alissa Johannsen Rubin is currently a Senior Foreign Correspondent for the New York Times. She has spent more than 20 years reporting overseas in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, Pakistan and in Europe.
She started covering Afghanistan in 2001 for the Los Angeles Times making her first visit to the country with the Taliban before they were ousted by the United States and its allies.
In 2003 she went to Iraq, spending most of the next seven years reporting in that country, serving as co-bureau chief in Baghdad for the Los Angeles Times and then bureau chief for the New York Times, covering the violent rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria, the United States troop surge and the rise of a tribal resistance to Al Qaeda.
In 2009 she moved to Afghanistan where she served as New York Times Kabul bureau chief for more than four years, traveling throughout the country and covering the divisive second election of Hamid Karzai, the return of the Taliban and the surge in U.S. forces in Afghanistan. She left Kabul to take the position of Paris bureau chief, however she continued to work on projects in Afghanistan and Iraq and joined the New York Times team covering the Islamic States’ takeover of northern and western Iraq in 2014. That August she sustained multiple serious injuries in a helicopter crash in Iraq, while covering the beleaguered Yazidi people.
The following year, still recovering from her injuries, she returned to Afghanistan to finish a project about the treatment of women, winning the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 2016 for her work. She was also winner of the Michael Kelly journalism award in 2016. Columbia University awarded her the John Chancellor award for lifetime achievement in the profession, She also was the winner of a 2010 overseas press Club award for a New York Times Magazine piece on female suicide bombers.
Ms. Rubin graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University with an honors degree in Renaissance studies; she holds a Masters degree from Columbia University in European History. In 2021-2022, she spent a year as a Nieman Foundation Fellow at Harvard, where she studied the history and religions of the Middle East.