Global Freedom of Expression

Ann Cooper

Ann Cooper is an award-winning journalist and foreign correspondent with more than 25 years of radio and print reporting experience. Before joining Columbia Journalism School‘s faculty in 2006, she was executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists for eight years, following a career on National Public Radio’s foreign staff. Appointed as NPR’s first Moscow bureau chief in 1987, Cooper covered the tumultuous events of the final years of Soviet communism. She co-edited a book, “Russia at the Barricades,” about the August 1991 failed coup attempt in Moscow. From 1992 to 1995 Cooper was NPR’s bureau chief in Johannesburg, and she later covered the United Nations for NPR. She has been an Edward R. Murrow fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the James H. Ottaway Sr. Visiting Professor of Journalism at State University of New York in New Paltz. Cooper is a journalism graduate of Iowa State University (ISU), which has honored her with the James W. Schwartz award for service to journalism and the Alumni Merit Award, given “for outstanding contributions to human welfare that transcend purely professional accomplishments and bring honor to the university.