Nafeesa Syeed

An award-winning journalist, Nafeesa Syeed has worked across the U.S., South Asia, Middle East, and North and East Africa over two decades. Most recently, she was an opinion editor at the Los Angeles Times, where she edited policy op-eds, narrative essays, and book reviews.

At The Associated Press, Nafeesa was a staff writer in the Iowa and Washington bureaus. She served as a national security reporter in Washington and Middle East correspondent for Bloomberg News. As a producer, she worked on Peabody-winning and Emmy-nominated documentaries at Fault Lines on Al Jazeera English. She was also a longform editor at The Caravan. Nafeesa is co-author of Arab Women Rising, published by Wharton. 

Previously, Nafeesa was a fellow at UCLA’s International Institute, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and University of Pennsylvania. She was the 2021-22 Writing in Color Fellow at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver. Her work has also appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Businessweek, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Christian Science Monitor, Al-Monitor, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, VICE, Tehelka, Guernica, Quartz, and The Believer, among others.

She has a B.A. from Georgetown University in Arabic and Government and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from SOAS, University of London.