Background

Azadeh Moaveni was born in 1976 in Palo Alto, California, United States. She grew up in San Jose, California.

Education

Azadeh Moaveni attended Cupertino High School. Then she studied politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Arabic at the American University in Cairo.

Career

Azadeh began her career in 1999 as a reporter in Cairo where she covered the students' riots at the University of Tehran, the worst disturbance the country, her family’s homeland, had experienced since its 1979 revolution. She joined Time magazine in 2000 as a Tehran and then New York-based reporter. As one of the few American correspondents permitted to work continuously in Iran throughout the 2000s, Azadeh has reported extensively on Iranian youth culture, women’s rights, social media and political change, and Iranian security issues, from its nuclear program to ties with Hezbollah and Syria. In 2003, she became a correspondent for The Los Angeles Times to cover the war in Iraq. She has also worked for the United Nations in Afghanistan.

In 2005, she settled in Tehran and started a family, documenting in her columns for Time how Iranians coped with the escalating sanctions against their country and the political tenure of a religious ideologue extreme even by local standards. Her work has focused throughout on how women and girls are disproportionately impacted by political instability and conflict, and the interplay between Islamism and women’s rights. In November 2015, she published a front-page piece in the New York Times on ISIS women defectors. She is an editor at the new media project IranWire, which seeks to empower Iranian citizen journalists and offers a platform where young Iranians can discuss issues of foreign policy and national interest. Her writing appears in the Foreign Policy, New York Times, the New Yorker, the Financial Times, The Guardian, Time, and other publications. She is currently a senior lecturer in journalism at Kingston University, London.

Azadeh has written two books, Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran (2005) and Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (2009) - which focus on the country’s youth culture, tangled ties with the West, and the rise of President Ahmadinejad. Accomplished at turning her hand to both investigative reporting and autobiographical work, she wrote about her experience growing up as an Iranian in America in her 2005 memoir, Lipstick Jihad, and put pen to paper to record her experiences of getting married and starting a family in Iran during the rise of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in her 2010 memoir, Honeymoon in Tehran. She also co-authored Shirin Ebadi’s memoir, Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope (2007). Her most recent published book Guest House for Young Widows (2019) follows thirteen women who joined, endured, and, in some cases, escaped life in the Islamic State.

Achievements

• Azadeh Moaveni was a finalist of Pulitzer Prize in 2015. She also was a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Egypt. Her piece in the New York Times on ISIS women was one of the most-read investigative features of the years.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran

    (Lipstick Jihad is the story of Azadeh Moaveni's search fo...)

    2005
  • Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

    (A gripping account of thirteen women who joined endured, ...)

    2019
  • Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran

    (Azadeh Moaveni returns to Iran to cover the rise of Presi...)

    2009

Views

Quotations: "Living here in the United Kingdom - as a Muslim, a journalist and as a woman - I was frustrated with the stories appearing in the press about ISIS and women and why girls from Britain decide to travel to Syria. The coverage was very sexualized and sensationalized - there seemed to be a determination to misunderstand, which resulted in reports I saw as offensive and unilluminating. I wanted to counter this with a more open and honest exploration of what was going on, in an attempt to better understand these women's decisions."

"Teaching sustains and enriches me. I particularly enjoy being at Kingston University as the student body is so diverse. It's made up of exactly the people I'm interested in teaching and working with. I find being around the University's students incredibly inspiring."

"My Iranian identity propelled me out into the world, partly because I always felt instinctively that the mosaic or multicultural façade of bi-cultural American identity was rather tinny. And then once I was gone, in Egypt first and then other parts of the Middle East, I felt released, really, and able to think and write from that same vantage point, but with a broader perspective."

"You can have an elected parliament that makes laws, but if the judiciary is appointed by the Supreme Leader - who is a representative of God - then you're kind of at an impasse."

"I think Iran is the kind of place where it's difficult to predict what's going to trigger structural change. It's hard to also predict the role that civil disobedience or mass protests could play."

Personality

Azadeh Moaveni is fluent in both Farsi and Arabic.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Azadeh is a truly exceptional journalist, a very fine writer, and an extremely brave reporter - and this particular article is a ground-breaking piece of reporting about an extremely difficult subject beset with a great deal of complexity. She is providing human faces and stories to challenge the assumptions we make about the people who have been involved in Islamic State." - Professor Brian Cathcart

Connections

Azadeh Moaveni is married. The marriage produced one child.