About
Kourosh Ziabari is an award-winning journalist, writer and scholar of media studies. He has earned a master of arts (MA) in political journalism at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. A member of PEN America and the Authors Guild, he is also a non-resident journalist at the National Press Club. He freelances for New Lines Magazine and Foreign Policy, among other publications.
In 2022, Kourosh was named the recipient of the Professional Excellence Award from the Foreign Press Correspondents Association (AFPC). He is also the silver medal winner of the Prince Albert II of Monaco and United Nations Correspondents Association’s Global Prize for Coverage of Climate Change. In the same year, he covered the United Nations General Assembly on a Dag Hammarskjold Fund for Journalists fellowship. He was also a member of the 2021 virtual cohort of the UN reporting program.
He was one of the eight awardees of the spring 2022 edition of the World Press Institute fellowship sponsored by the University of St. Thomas. He was the program’s first Iranian fellow since 1979, when it was still being conducted by the Macalester College. In 2016, he was awarded a Chevening Scholarship by the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
Having practiced journalism since a young age, he started his career with the local Hatef weekly magazine in late 1990s. Founded by his late father Seyed Hossein Ziabari, Hatef has been in print since 1991. Between 2007-12, he worked as a contributor to Daneshmand (scientist), Iran’s oldest popular science magazine. At the initiative of the magazine’s former editor, Kourosh conducted exclusive interviews with some 30 Nobel Prize laureates in physics, chemistry, medicine, economics and peace, including Frances Arnold, Douglas Osheroff, Anthony James Leggett, Frank Wilczek, Klaus von Klitzing, Wolfgang Ketterle, Brian Josephson, Nicolaas Bloembergen, Brian Kobilka, Martin Chalfie, George A. Olah, J. Robin Warren, Heinrich Rorher, Antony Hewish, Vernon L. Smith and Edmund S. Phelps.
Articles and essays by Kourosh have appeared in The American Conservative, Politico, UnHerd, openDemocracy, Al-Monitor, The National Interest, Middle East Eye, Truthout, IPS Journal, The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, The Interpreter (Lowy Institute), PassBlue, Democracy in Exile, Fair Observer, The New Arab, TRT World, Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, Middle East Institute, Atlantic Council, Stimson Center, Arab Center Washington DC, Responsible Statecraft, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and others.
For five years, Kourosh covered Iran for Asia Times as a correspondent from Rasht. He has also worked with Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations as an Iran and Middle East analyst and was an elected individual member of Chatham House: The Royal Institute of International Affairs in 2017. As a speaker, he has addressed such venues as Cambridge Union; California State University, Sacramento; Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota; Concordia Summit; and Goldsmiths, University of London.
He was named a finalist of the Kurt Schork Awards in International Journalism sponsored by the Kurt Schork Memorial Fund and Thomson Reuters Foundation in 2020, 2021 and 2022. In October 2018, he was named the Journalist of the Month by the International Journalists Network.
In May 2018, Kourosh was selected by the Heinrich Boll Foundation to participate in the Congress of Young Europeans in Prague, Czech Republic. He was one of the 70 delegates selected from a pool of 200 applicants to take part in the event held in August-September 2018. He has also reported on grants by the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Baku, Republic of Azerbaijan, and Changsha, China.
In November 2016, Kourosh reported from the World Forum for Democracy in Strasbourg through a fellowship by the Council of Europe. In April 2016, he became the first Iranian delegate taking part in the American Middle Eastern Network for Dialog at Stanford (AMENDS) program. He gave a talk at the summit discussing his ambitions for better Iran-U.S. relations after decades of tumultuous relations.
In June 2015, Kourosh covered the Global Media Forum 2015 in Bonn, Germany as part of a reporting program organized by Deutsche Welle and European Youth Press. He was a member of a group of 16 young international journalists who received a grant to produce an edition of the Orange Magazine. The theme of the 2015 forum was “Media and Foreign Policy in the Digital Age.”
Kourosh was the recipient of the Senior Journalists Seminar 2015 fellowship awarded to him by the East-West Center. The program took 16 journalists to Malaysia and Pakistan as well as three US cities of Washington D.C., Nashville and Honolulu in a 21-day traveling and reporting program, exploring the intersection of religion and foreign policy decision-making.
In November 2015, Kourosh was awarded the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Fellowship in Cultural Journalism by the FNPI foundation and the Colombian Ministry of Culture, and traveled to the Bolivar Department north of Colombia, reporting on the history of the cities of Cartagena de Indias and Santa Cruz de Mompox. The fellowship brought together 15 international journalists for two weeks of field reporting, workshops and cultural exchange in the Caribbean country.
Kourosh has interviewed world leaders, diplomats, academicians, media personalities and writers including Heinz Fischer, Armen Sarkissian, Aleksander Kwasniewski, Kjell Magne Bondevik, James A Michel, Massimo D’Alema, Gediminas Kirkilas, Jose Ramos-Horta, F. W. de Klerk, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, Mario Soares, Carl Bildt, Kristalina Georgieva, Edgars Rinkevics, Erhard Busek, Hans Blix, Ana Palacio, Evangelos Venizelos, Jean Asselborn, Mogens Lykketoft, Viviane Reding, Didier Reynders, Massimo Bray, Emma Bonino, Keit Pentus-Rosimannus, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, Miroslav Lajcak, Ivaylo Kalfin, Theodoros Pangalos, Ruprecht Polenz, Jon Baldvin Hannibalsson, Jutta Urpilainen, Georgios Iacovou, Janko Veber, Jack Straw, John W. Ashe, Lawrence Korb, Admiral James Stavridis, Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, Olli Heinonen, Pierre Goldschmidt, Jim Slattery, Amb. Frank Wisner, Amb. William Green Miller, Amb. Thomas R. Pickering, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, Michael Parenti, Jean Bricmont, David Barsamian, Zygmunt Bauman, Glenn Greenwald, Henry Giroux, Michael Behe, Gary Sick, Charles Eisenstein, Marjorie Cohn, John Tirman, Sheldon Richman, Diana Johnstone, Richard Foltz, Vijay Prashad, Deepak Tripathi, Keith Locke, Noam Chomsky, Peter Singer, Stephen Kinzer, Ted Rall, Eric Margolis, Linh Dinh, Dave Lindorff, Paul R. Pillar, Pastor Terry Jones, Alain de Botton, Erri De Luca, Gilad Atzmon, Andre Vletchek, Antony Loewenstein, Sami Yusuf, Sid Ganis, Alan Hart, Wayne Madsen, and Paul Craig Roberts.
In 2009, Kourosh was selected to represent the students of the Middle East in the International Student Energy Summit (ISES 2009) in Calgary, Canada, where, as a member of the student assembly, he interviewed the former Mexican President Vicente Fox. The same year, his paper was accepted for presentation at the Annual Worldwide Forum on Education and Culture in Rome, Italy. He also received a bursary to attend the 18th International Youth Leadership Conference which was held from July 19th to 24th in Prague, Czech Republic.
His work of journalism has been cited in several books and academic journals, including the 2017 book “The Bitter Taste of Hope: Ideals, Ideologies and Interests in the Age of Obama” by Stephen Eric Bronner. In 2009, he contributed a chapter to the seminal book on the post-election uprising in Iran, edited by Prof. Yahya Kamalipour. Titled Media, Power, and Politics in the Digital Age, the book was published by Rowman & Littlefield.
Kourosh is married to Zahra Kazemi, a graduate of English language and literature. They met while they were studying a bachelor’s degree in English language at the University of Guilan.
In the afternoon of Sunday, April 20, 2014, a turning point emerged in the personal life of Kourosh and Zahra, and their daughter, Termeh, opened her eyes to this world!