A Work-Life Luncheon for Women in Media

Biography of Soledad O’Brien

Soledad O’Brien is the co-anchor of CNN American Morning. She joined CNN in 2003. The program is based in New York City and is CNN’s flagship morning program. At CNN she was part of the team that won a George Foster Peabody award for coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. She was part of the team that won an Alfred I DuPont award for the coverage of the tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia in December 2004.

Before joining CNN, Soledad anchored NBC’s Weekend Today show. She has covered every major news story over the past decade. She was the only broadcast journalist to travel with Laura Bush to Paris and Moscow, she’s reported from Havana, Cuba and Guantanamo Bay, from London on the terror attacks and anchored live coverage from Cyprus and Jerusalem on the hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah.

Soledad won the Hispanic Heritage Foundation Vision Award in 2005 and the Reuben Salazar Journalism Award from the National Council of La Raza in the same year. She was awarded the Woman of Power award by the National Urban League in 2006, and the National Association of Minorities in Cable (NAMIC) Vision Award in 2006. Soledad won an Emmy award for anchoring the Discovery Channel’s The Know Zone. Newsweek magazine named Soledad one of its 15 People Who Make America Great (The Giving Back Awards) the first year the award was given, 2006. O’Brien graduated from Harvard University with a degree in English and American Literature. She received honorary PhD’s from Sienna and Mercy Colleges. She is married with four children and lives in New York City.