Reporter
The GroundTruth ProjectLauren is The GroundTruth Project’s Middle East correspondent.
Lauren is The GroundTruth Project’s inaugural Middle East correspondent, formerly a columnist for Foreign Policy magazine. She’s the co-founder of Foreign Policy Interrupted, a start-up incubator and fellowship program dedicated to changing the ratio and getting more women miked and bylined.She’s also the co-founder of SchoolCycle, a United Nations Foundation campaign in Malawi to provide bikes for adolescent girls to get to school.She was a 2010-2011 Fulbright fellow in Egypt, where she is the founding assistant editor of a new journal, the Cairo Review. A Pulitzer Center grantee, her ongoing reporting project “Egypt: The Country Outside the Square” is funded by the center. She was a 2012 Overseas Press Club fellow in Jerusalem with the Associated Press, and a 2013 UN Foundation Press fellow.A finalist for a 2012 Livingston Award, her multimedia work has been published by the New York Times, CNN, TIME, NBC News, the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Beast, Foreign Policy, Businessweek, Salon, Global Post, Christian Science Monitor, Rolling Stone Middle East, Marie Claire, and Ms. Magazine, among others. She’s reported from Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Syria, the UAE, Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, Zambia, Malawi, and Nigeria.While an undergrad at NYU, she was was an intern at TIME Magazine, where she interviewed Marilyn Manson at midnight (and he told her to wear more eyeliner). She also interned at CNN under Soledad O’Brien and Christiane Amanpour. She graduated summa cum laude from New York University in May 2009 as a John W. Withers Memorial Award recipient and Presidential Scholar, with a degree in Media, Culture and Communication. She received Chicago’s Association for Women Journalists 2010 award for outstanding young female journalist and received her master’s degree from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism in June 2010.Originally from the ‘burbs of Philadelphia (#WawaForLife) where she was named an Archdiocesan scholar and a Champion of Caring for her work in Appalachia and the Dominican Republic, Lauren has a nerdy obsession with all things stationery (and peanut butter) and is usually downright amazed by everything she learns from the extraordinary and resilient people she gets to meet for a living.
This week, Egypt will hold a presidential election, but observers believe the process is a charade. The only viable opposition candidates have been jailed, deported or silenced. And the only other candidate on the ballot, Moussa Mostafa Moussa, is actually a backer of Sisi, and has said he hopes the incumbent wins.
It’s been a year since the 2014 Israel-Gaza war. In the wake of the conflict, vast devastation can still be seen across the Gaza Strip’s scarred landscape. Despite the challenges of living in Gaza, many press forward. These six women are working to find their way despite the trying circumstances.