Ilana Ozernoy took up reporting in 2001, when she returned to Moscow fifteen years after her family fled Russia as political refugees with the help of Senator Edward Kennedy.

Weeks after 9/11, she traveled to the Afghan outback to cover the U.S.-led battle against the Taliban. She followed the Northern Alliance as the rebel army pushed towards Kabul, writing for The Boston Globe and U.S. News & World Report. After the war, she co-authored the essay and photo book “Afghanistan: The Road to Kabul.”

In 2002, Ozernoy traveled to the Uganda-Sudan border to write about the child soldiers of the Lord’s Resistance Army. In 2003, she covered the invasion of Iraq for U.S. News & World Report, and established and ran the magazine’s Baghdad bureau until February of 2005.

During her two years in Iraq, Ozernoy wrote about the occupation, about sectarian violence, terrorism, religion and Iraqi politics. She traveled extensively throughout the country and embedded with the U.S. military for several major battles, including Fallujah in November 2004.

Following Iraq, she returned to her native Russia to write about American Evangelicals in Siberia, traveled to Belarus to write about the Lukashenko regime, reported from the Netherlands and UK for a series about corporate espionage, and journeyed to Morocco to profile Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes for The Atlantic.

In 2008, Ozernoy was awarded a MacDowell fellowship, and she began to work on a nonfiction book about the Refuseniks, interwoven with the story of her family’s historic struggle as Soviet-era dissidents.

Over the years, her writing has also appeared in The New Republic, dispatches Quarterly, Newsweek, and Marie Claire, among others. She has also contributed to CNN and NPR.

Ozernoy is currently an Assistant Professor at the SUNY Stony Brook School of Journalism, where she teaches news literacy, multimedia journalism, and reporting and writing. She is also working to establish The Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting at Stony Brook, including program development and fundraising. Most recently, she took student journalists on a two-week reporting trip to Kenya’s Rift Valley. She resides in New York.