Lauren Wolfe is an award-winning journalist who has written for publications from The Atlantic to The New York Times. She is a contributing writer for Washington Monthly, and has taught as an adjunct professor at NYU’s graduate school of journalism. She is the publisher of Chills, where she pulls back the curtain on her more than two decades of international investigative reporting. Wolfe was an editor and reporter for the live New York Times coverage of both the coronavirus and the presidential election in 2020.
Before that, she was the creator and director of WMC WomenUnderSiegeProject.org, a journalism initiative on sexualized violence in conflict originated by Gloria Steinem at the Women’s Media Center. The project included a live, crowd-sourced map of sexualized violence in Syria carried out in conjunction with the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health.
From the BBC to CNN, she has spoken about her work on TV and radio internationally. In 2015, she testified before the UK House of Lords, and in 2012, she testified at the United Nations on her team’s findings on rape in Syria. She has conducted field reporting from the Middle East to Central Africa to Central America, interviewing hundreds of women and men suffering from the fallout of war.
Previously, Wolfe was the senior editor of the Committee to Protect Journalists, where she focused on journalists and sexualized violence. Her CPJ report “The Silencing Crime” broke ground in documenting the issue.
Wolfe also worked at The New York Times reporting on September 11th for Times books 102 Minutes: The Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers and City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center.
In 2017, after a series of articles and photos in The Guardian and Foreign Policy magazine directly led to the arrest of a politician for raping toddlers in eastern Congo, she was named a finalist for the Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics, the Kurt Schork Memorial Award, and the One World Media Awards, and was called one of five journalists “making a big difference in the world” by Bono’s One.org. She is an inductee of the Ochberg Society for journalists who cover violence, has taught as an adjunct in Columbia’s Strategic Communications masters’ program, and been a fellow at the Blue Mountain Center.
In 2013, Foreign Policy magazine named Wolfe one of its “FP Twitterati 100,” calling her an “authority on gender and conflict,” Action on Armed Violence included her in their list “Top 100: The Most Influential Journalists Covering Armed Violence,” and the UK’s Daily Telegraph named her “an awesome woman you need in your life on Twitter.”