Kira Kay
GRANTEE
Kira Kay is Executive Director of the Bureau for International Reporting (BIR) – a non-profit organization dedicated to producing and providing vital international television news programming to an American audience.
She was the recipient of the 2008 Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Award in International Journalism for her reporting on the war in Northern Uganda and an Emmy Award winner for her story on the impact of the rise of the global middle class in India.
Last August, Kay and her team from the BIR, with support from the Pulitzer Center, were already on the ground in Georgia and reporting from the separatist territory of Abkhazia when Russian tanks rolled in. Their reporting provided the only American television news coverage of the dynamics and background of this war, not just the fighting itself.
Recently, Kay has also covered United Nations peacekeeping in the Congo for NOW on PBS, reported on U.S. military actions in Africa for Dan Rather Reports, explored the plight of Iraqi refugees in Jordan for PBS Wide Angle and served as correspondent for a PBS NewsHour story on the start of the Khmer Rouge tribunals in Cambodia.
In 2005, she consulted for the New York Times on their official submission to the PBS America at a Crossroads series, "Indonesia: Struggle for the Soul of Islam." In 2004 she was nominated for an Emmy for her coverage of the Darfur crisis for CBS 60 Minutes, and in 2002 was one of only a handful of American journalists allowed access to the war-torn province of Aceh, Indonesia. She began her career at ABC News.
Kay holds a master's degree in international public policy from the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a fellow of the U.S.-Japan Foundation Leadership Program.
Links to the Bureau for International Reporting:
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Links to recent work:
Wide Angle, July 22, 2009: The Market Maker
Now on PBS, May 15, 2009: Can the UN Keep the Peace?
PBS NewsHour, August 21, 2008: Inside Abkhazia
HDNet World Report, September 15, 2008: Crisis in the Caucasus
Now on PBS, June 20, 2008: India Rising
PBS NewsHour, April 26, 2007: Uganda's Silent War