Joanna Kakissis

Joanna Kakissis leads NPR's bureau in Kyiv, coverage of Ukraine and Russia's war on the country.

Since the Kyiv bureau officially opened in January 2023, Kakissis and her team have documented the war through those fighting and living through it: The network of citizen-spies who helped liberate their city from occupation, and how, a year later, that city is still attacked by Russia every day. The children's writer murdered by Russian soldiers and dumped in a mass grave, and the rising young novelist who sought justice for him — only to be killed herself in a missile strike. The reconnaissance and special forces soldiers setting the groundwork for a daring counteroffensive front on the Dnipro River, and the catastrophic flood they faced instead. A talented young musical duo silenced by a Russian missile just minutes after performing near their hometown. The soldiers trained by NATO engaged a slow, painful counteroffensive. The de-mining experts trying to remove explosives from a heavily-mined frontline. The volunteer rescue worker who evacuated thousands from his hometown before it was destroyed. The village burying a sixth of its population after a bombing — and betrayal. The second-graders attending classes underground in a besieged city.

Kakissis began reporting in Ukraine shortly before Russia invaded in February 2022. She covered the exodus of refugees to Poland, staying for several weeks to profile the Polish families taking in Ukrainians, the unlikely volunteers trying to join the Ukrainian army, and an all-female driving service keeping Ukrainian women safe.

She returned to Ukraine several times in 2022 to chronicle the human costs of the war, reporting on the displaced, the families of prisoners of war and the search for collaborators. She introduced listeners to a theater troupe who survived the Russian destruction of their city and reunited on a new stage, and a ninety-year-old "mermaid" who swims in a mine-filled sea. She highlighted the tragedy for both sides with a story about the body of a Russian soldier abandoned in a hamlet he helped destroy, and she shed light on the potential for nuclear disaster with a report on the shelling of Nikopol by Russians occupying a nearby power plant.

Kakissis started working with NPR in 2011 from Athens, Greece as a freelancer and traveled extensively throughout Europe for the network over the next decade. Her work focused on the forces straining European unity — migration, nationalism and the rise of illiberalism in Hungary. She led coverage of the eurozone debt crisis and the mass migration of mostly Syrian refugees to Europe. Her coverage included a profile of an Eritrean teenage refugee trapped in Libya during COVID, the Hungarian Roma writers translating Amanda Gorman's poetry, a Greek island devastated by climate change-fueled wildfires and a series on Uyghurs in Turkey.

She's reported extensively in central and eastern Europe and also filled in at NPR bureaus in Berlin, Istanbul, Jerusalem, London, Paris and Rome.

Before joining NPR's staff in 2022, she was a contributor to the award-winning audio documentary program This American Life and also wrote for The New York Times, TIME, The New Yorker online and The Financial Times Magazine, among others. In 2021, she taught a journalism seminar on nationalism and migration 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. [Copyright 2024 NPR]