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Donatella Lorch has been a reporter and correspondent for more than twenty years and has covered wars and conflicts in South Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe for The New York Times, NBC News and Newsweek. Her writing has been praised for humanizing the cost and politics of war and giving a face not only to the fighters but to affected civilians as well. She has won awards for her reporting on Afghanistan and the Rwanda genocide as well as for her coverage of massive refugee migrations that have torn apart families and transplanted cultures. For two years, she was the director of the Knight International Press Fellowship, a program funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which sends American reporters abroad to share the best practices of journalism. Most recently, she was the reporter for Explorer: Inside Guantanamo, a National Geographic Television documentary on the American detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Lorch began reporting in 1987, traveling with and writing about the little known Afghan Mujaheddin guerrillas and their war against the Soviet occupation. Hired by The New York Times, she based herself in Peshawar, Pakistan, took more than a dozen trips into Afghanistan, and was the first reporter and only woman journalist to be smuggled into Kabul to document the guerrilla underground. From Pakistan, she also wrote about the assassination of President Zia ul-Haq, the election of Benazir Bhutto, and the Pakistan government’s growing nuclear capability.

In the following years, she covered more than a dozen wars, including Operation Desert Storm (Iraq) and the fall of Kabul to the Afghan guerrillas in 1992. As East Africa Bureau Chief for The New York Times, she covered the civil war and famine in Somalia as well as the U.S. and U.N. intervention and pullout. She traveled with the rebels in southern Sudan, reported on the reign of terror of the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda, and witnessed the massacres in the hills of Burundi. But it was the story of the Rwandan genocide that, she says, has never left her. One of the few reporters to drive into Kigali a few days after the killings started, she spent the next year reporting from massacre sites, refugee camps and post-war Rwanda in an effort to document the unfolding of the genocide and the effort at rebuilding a country.

After joining NBC News in 1996 as an on-air correspondent, Lorch followed the tracks of war criminals in Bosnia, the war in Kosovo and its refugees in Albania, and reported on the terrorist bombing of the U.S. embassy in Kenya. But it is her passion for and knowledge of Afghanistan and Rwanda, refugee issues, and the role of the media in the battlefield that have become her trademark. As a correspondent for Newsweek, she reported from Africa and the U.S. on refugee resettlement issues for Sudan’s “Lost Boys” and the Somali Bantus. In 2002, she returned to Afghanistan to embed with a U.S. Army Special Forces A Team and again in 2003 to base herself in the Taliban stronghold of South-eastern Afghanistan to write about the stalled efforts at reconstruction. In late 2008, she went back to Afghanistan to track down and interview former Guantanamo Bay detainees as part of a documentary on the American prison.

Lorch, who speaks English, French, and Italian as well as conversational Spanish and Chinese, earned a B.A. in Chinese History from Barnard College in 1983 as well as an M.A. in Indic Studies and an M.A. in International Affairs, both from Columbia University. She is a recipient of the Alicia Patterson Fellowship and several reporting prizes. She has been profiled in the Freedom Forum and Newseum exhibit on war reporting, as well as in several books on war correspondents, including War Stories (2003) and Bearing Witness: the Lives of War Correspondents and Photo Journalists (Denise Leith, Random House, Australia, 2004); That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity (James Dawes, Harvard University Press, 2007) and a BBC/ Discovery Channel “Reporters at War” series.

Lorch has written book chapters on post-traumatic stress as well as the role of the media in humanitarian crises. She lectures extensively on war reporting, journalism ethics, refugee issues, humanitarian intervention, and the role of the media in the battlefield. She has been a frequent guest speaker on CNN, FOX, MSNBC, BBC,CBC, PBS (The Charlie Rose Show), C-SPAN and National Public Radio. She is a recipient of the 2008 Barnard College Distinguished Alumna Award.

She lives in Kenya with her husband Johannes Zutt, who works at The World Bank. The couple met when she interviewed him on the subject of Sudanese refugees. They married in 2003 and live with their three children from his first marriage, Madeline, Nicholas and Alexander, as well as their son, Lucas.

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