Mary Kay Magistad is Associate Director of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, and an award-winning journalist who lived and reported in East Asia for more than two decades, including in China for NPR (1995-99) and PRX’s The World (2003-13). She has reported in every province in China, most countries in Asia and some in Africa about how China’s rise has been affecting individual lives and having global impact. For her podcast with the Global Reporting Centre, “On China’s New Silk Road” (2020), she reported on five continents with local journalists on how China’s global ambition in general, and its Belt & Road Initiative in particular, are seen and felt.  The podcast was recognized by Scripps Howard and the One World Media Awards (UK) as one of the top three entries in the audio awards category. Her earlier podcast with The World, “Whose Century Is It?,” a Webby Award honoree, took a deep dive into ideas, trends, and twists shaping power dynamics around the world in this century.

Ms. Magistad is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has been a Nieman Fellow and Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University. She has an MA from the University of Sussex in international relations, with a concentration in development studies, and an undergraduate degree from Northwestern University in journalism and history. She has taught international reporting and audio journalism at the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, where she headed the audio journalism department. She lives in San Francisco.