Jean MacKenzie
Jean MacKenzie, journalist and writer, has spent most of the past 20 years in and around conflict zones. A Russia specialist, she lived and worked in Moscow for more than a decade, covering the collapse of the Soviet Union and the painful development of a new society. As a reporter and columnist for the Moscow Times, she traveled extensively in the mid-1990s, covering the parliamentary and presidential elections, the rise and fall of Boris Yeltsin and the birth of a new social consciousness among the Russian middle class.
In 1998, when Russia defaulted on its loans and the country slid into economic chaos, Mackenzie was writing for the Christian Science Monitor, the Boston Globe and Newsday. Since 2000, she has been working in media development, first in Belarus, then in Central Asia, most recently in Afghanistan, where she has initiated a journalism training project in Helmand province, the heart of the Taleban insurgency.
Over the past eight years, she has mentored dozens of reporters in conflict zones, helped fledgling media get on their feet, and taught journalism basics and ethics to hundreds of reporters. A native of Boston, Massachusetts, MacKenzie speaks fluent Russian, passable French and is now acquiring rudimentary Dari and Pashto.