Joanna Kakissis
Joanna Kakissis is an international correspondent based in Kyiv, Ukraine, where she leads NPR's bureau and coverage of a conflict that has upended millions of lives, affected global energy and food supplies and pitted NATO against Russia.
Kakissis began reporting in Ukraine shortly before Russia invaded in February. She covered the exodus of refugees to Poland and has returned to Ukraine several times to chronicle the war. She has focused on the human costs, profiling , the and who swims in a mine-filled sea. Kakissis highlighted the tragedy for both sides abandoned in a hamlet he helped destroy, and she with a report on the shelling of Nikopol by Russians occupying a nearby power plant.
Kakissis began reporting regularly for NPR from her base in Athens, Greece, in 2011. Her work has largely focused on the forces straining European unity 鈥� migration, nationalism and the rise of illiberalism in Hungary. She led coverage of the eurozone debt crisis and the mass migration of Syrian refugees to Europe. She's reported extensively in central and eastern Europe and has also filled in at NPR bureaus in Berlin, Istanbul, Jerusalem, London and Paris. She's a contributor to This American Life and has written for The New York Times, TIME, The New Yorker online and The Financial Times Magazine, among others. In 2021, she taught a journalism seminar as a visiting professor at Princeton University.
Kakissis was born in Greece, grew up in North and South Dakota and spent her early years in journalism at The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina.
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Leaders in Dublin have declared that unemployment in Ireland is finally dropping, especially among youth. The reason there are fewer young people looking for jobs, however, is because many have simply left the country.
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The Roma have lived in Europe for centuries, and face persecution and isolation. Many are illiterate and are more likely to be unemployed, impoverished and in poor health than other Europeans. They have been in the news after a blond, blue-eyed girl was taken from a Roma couple in Greece. -
George Polk was a CBS correspondent covering the Greek civil war when he was murdered in 1948. Three men were convicted of involvement, but now an ex-prosecutor wants to reopen the case. -
The estimated 250,000 children that go missing each year range from teenage runaways escaping abuse at home to kids who have fled war-torn countries such as Afghanistan. -
The Golden Dawn Party, which holds seats in parliament, uses Nazi symbols and threatens people who don't agree with its brand of nationalism. Officials say it's a criminal gang: Party leaders have been arrested on charges including murder. But supporters say they're being persecuted for their beliefs. -
The Golden Dawn party has long been suspected of carrying out violent attacks against immigrants, but the Sept. 18 killing of an anti-fascist rapper incited national outrage. -
Baby-faced Giannis Antetokounmpo, the 19-year-old Greek basketball phenom, was taken with the 15th pick in this year's NBA draft. Antetokounmpo's success has heartened many Greeks desperate for their country to become an incubator of dreams instead of a dead zone of joblessness. -
Jews have lived in Greece since the time of Alexander the Great; the overwhelming majority of the community died during the Nazi occupation. Now, 70 years later, the community 鈥� and Greece 鈥� is confronting the rise of the Golden Dawn Party, a group that espouses neo-Nazi ideology. -
The factory in northern Greece once produced glue for ceramic tiles. But when the country's economy collapsed and workers lost their jobs, they took it over to make environmentally friendly laundry products. Workers do everything from accounting to driving. Their effort is a hit with left-wing groups, but it's not showing up in workers' paychecks. -
A year into his tenure as prime minister at a time of economic crisis, Harvard-educated economist Antonis Samaras is viewed with suspicion by many Greeks. "He always leaped into the unknown and usually fell in the crevice," one political analyst says.
