ABOUT LAUREN
“There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”—Arundhati Roy
Lauren brings more than a decade of award-winning journalism and entrepreneurism to her role as Senior Director of Strategy and Communications at The Hope Center—a research action center dedicated to education equity.
She’s also the content series editor of Free Future, a collaboration between The Meteor and The Ford Foundation, dedicated to exploring the systemic public health crisis that is gender-based violence.
Formerly she was the Director of Communications at Media Impact Funders and Editorial Director of YES! Media, a solutions journalism magazine in Seattle and The GroundTruth Project’s inaugural Middle East correspondent. Based in the Middle East for almost a decade, she was one of the first women columnists at Foreign Policy magazine and co-founded Foreign Policy Interrupted, an initiative dedicated to amplifying women-identifying voices in international affairs.
She’s the co-founder of SchoolCycle, a United Nations Foundation campaign in Malawi and Guatemala that provides bicycles for adolescent girls to get to school. She’s also the founding deputy editor of the Cairo Review of Global Affairs in Egypt, where she was a Fulbright fellow and Pulitzer Center grantee.
She’s a 2022 fellow at the New America Foundation, a 2020 Atlantic Council Millennium fellow, and was named a 2017 Rising Talent by the Women’s Forum for the Economy & Society.
She was a 2012 Overseas Press Club fellow in Jerusalem with the Associated Press and a UN Foundation Press fellow. A finalist for a 2012 Livingston Award, she has reported from Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Syria, the U.A.E., Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Zambia, Malawi, Kenya, Nigeria, Guinea, South Africa, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Brazil, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.
Her multimedia work has been published by The New Yorker, WIRED, the New York Times, Bon Appétit, the Wall Street Journal, the AP, CNN, NBC News, Businessweek, Newsweek, TIME, Foreign Policy, the Atlantic, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, ELLE, among others.
She graduated summa cum laude from New York University as a John W. Withers 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 journalist and her master’s degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
She is on the board of ArtLords, a global grassroots art movement for social change that began in Afghanistan, and on the editorial board of Inkstick Media, dedicated to foreign policy for the rest of us.
Lauren is originally from Philadelphia, where she is currently based, and remains a proud patron of Wawa. She’s a Leo—sun, moon, and rising—and loves stickers.
