Natacha Yazbeck, Ph.D.

Natacha Yazbeck is a multimedia journalist and researcher focusing on race, labor, and rights in journalism and digital media. A former Middle East correspondent, she holds a Ph.D. in Communication from the Annenberg School.

Natacha Yazbeck is the Associate Director of the Center on Digital Culture and Society and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center. She is a 2020-2021 Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and a recipient of the 2020 Leeway Transformation Award.

A multimedia journalist, storyteller, and former foreign correspondent, her research focuses on race, rights, and invisible structures of discrimination that have survived the digital transition in journalism. Her literary nonfiction work and photography have been published by Penguin, Polity, Sage, and Getty Images. She is most recently the author of “Spin,” featured in Our Women on the Ground (Penguin, 2019), the first anthology of essays by Arab women reporting from the Arab world.

Prior to joining the Center, Yazbeck covered conflict, politics, and society in Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen for close to a decade for Agence France-Presse (AFP). Yazbeck is also a consultant on media, digital equity, and human rights. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in Communication from Annenberg, and an M.A. in Sociology from the American University of Beirut. During her fellowship, she will be working on a book manuscript examining the impact of digitization on war and its coverage, trauma, and memory.