Advisory Council

Ann Cooper worked as a reporter in the former Soviet Union, Africa, and Washington, D.C., before becoming the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists in July 1998.

Her voice is well known to radio listeners in the United States from her nine years as a correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR). She has also reported for The Louisville Courier-Journal, Capitol Hill News Service, Congressional Quarterly, The Baltimore Sun, and National Journal magazine.

Appointed as NPR's first Moscow bureau chief in 1987, Cooper spent five years covering the tumultuous events of the times, including the failed coup attempt in Moscow. She co-edited a book of first-person accounts of that siege, “Russia at the Barricades.”

NPR also sent her to Beijing to cover the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement. Based in Johannesburg, South Africa, from 1992 to 1995, Cooper's coverage there won NPR a prestigious Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award in broadcast journalism.

Cooper traveled throughout Africa, writing features and analysis on a range of subjects, including the famine and international intervention in Somalia, the 1994 Rwandan refugee crisis, and the cholera epidemic in Zaire. Returning to the United States in 1995, she studied refugee policy issues as a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City and also traveled in Kenya, Rwanda, Zaire, Bosnia, and Haiti to produce a series on refugee policy for NPR.

She has taught radio and international reporting at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.