Christine Spolar

Christine Spolar has been a journalist for decades, working as a writer, correspondent and editor on investigations and in conflict zones. She was the Washington Post correspondent in Bosnia and Eastern Europe during the Balkans wars, the Chicago Tribune bureau chief in Baghdad during the Iraq war, and the Financial Times global investigations editor in London. Most recently, she was the international business editor for the New York Times, based in London, and executive editor of Kaiser Health News, based in Washington, D.C. Early in her career, she worked on the investigation’s team at the Post, then headed by Bob Woodward, and later produced investigations at CBS’s 60 Minutes II. She has been based in Ljubljana, Warsaw, Jerusalem, Rome, Cairo, London, Los Angeles, New York and Washington. 

Over her career, Spolar has covered tumultuous times, including Eastern Europe’s transition from Communism and Iran’s nuclear stalemate with the West. In 2008, she covered the financial crisis from Rome. She most recently reported on the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign from the battleground state of Pennsylvania. As an editor at the Financial Times, she managed award-winning investigations on money laundering and cyber security and, with Pulitzer Center funding, a deep dive into global land grabs. During the Covid pandemic, she worked on "Lost on the Frontline," an accounting of Covid deaths in the United States, a project partnered by Kaiser Health News and the Guardian. She continues to write for Kaiser Health News, the Washington Post and National Geographic. 

Spolar has taught at Georgetown University, American University and the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. She was a Fulbright professor in Slovenia at the time of the Balkans war; she started her foreign career by reporting from Sarajevo. 

She is a graduate of Northwestern University, Medill School, where she was editor-in-chief of the Daily Northwestern and trained as a Dow Jones editing fellow. She earned a master’s degree at Ohio State University through the Kiplinger Fellowship, where she first studied statistics. She recently studied mapping and coding at Goldsmiths University in London.