Emmy Award-Winning Journalist
News Anchor, NBC Today
Co-Anchor, Dateline NBC
Ann Curry was named co-anchor of Dateline NBC in May 2005 and news anchor for NBC News Today in March 1997.
Ms. Curry has distinguished herself in global humanitarian reporting. From March 2006 to March 2007, she traveled three times to Sudan to report on the violence and ethnic cleansing taking place in Darfur and Chad. While there, she provided in-depth reports focusing on the victims who have been caught in the deadly conflict in that region, and she also conducted exclusive interviews with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and Chadian President Idrsiss Deby. In July 2006, Ms. Curry reported on the Israel-Lebanon war, and she was one of the only American reporters to file stories on both sides of the conflict from Beruit and Northern Israel.
In the summer of 2005, Ms. Curry traveled with First Lady Laura Bush throughout Africa to discuss issues that plague the continent such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic and women’s rights and education. She was the first network news anchor to report from inside the tsunami zone in Southeast Asia, filing live and taped reports from Sri Lanka for Dateline, Today and NBC Nightly News. She was also the first network news anchor to report on the humanitarian refugee crisis caused by the genocide in Kosovo, reporting for NBC News from Albania and Macedonia.
In the first two weeks following the attacks of September 11, Ms. Curry reported live from ground zero every day. When the United States bombed Al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan in November 2001, she reported extensively from the USS Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, and landed the first exclusive interview the war¡¦s military commander, General Tommy Franks. Ms. Curry reported from Baghdad in the weeks leading up to the war in Iraq, and then from the USS Constellation as the war began, interviewing fighter pilots who flew the first wave of bombing runs over Iraq. She also filed reports from inside Iraq, from Qatar, and Kuwait during the first weeks of the war.
Ms. Curry¡¦s exclusive interviews include Liberia¡¦s Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the first female elected President of an African nation, the first highly sought after interview with Thomas Hamill, the truck driver for Halliburton subsidiary KBR, who escaped captivity in Iraq, the first interview with accused spy Wen Ho Lee after he was cleared of all charges of espionage against the United States, and the first interview with the parents of the McCaughey septuplets. Ms. Curry has also repeatedly landed the first exclusive interview with Lance Armstrong after his Tour de France wins.
Ms. Curry first joined NBC News in August 1990 as a Chicago-based correspondent. In 1992 she was named anchor of NBC News at Sunrise. She later helped launch MSNBC and then became news anchor at Today. Before coming to NBC, Ms. Curry was a reporter for KCBS in Los Angeles. In 1981, she was a reporter and anchor for KGW, the NBC affiliate in Portland, Oregon.
Ms. Curry began her broadcasting career as an intern in 1978 at KTVL, in Medford Oregon, near her hometown, rising to become that station’s first female news reporter.
Ms. Curry has earned two Emmys, four Golden Mikes, several Associated Press Certificates of Excellence, two Gracies, and an award for Excellence in Reporting from the NAACP. In June 2007, she was honored with the Simon Wiesenthal Medal of Valor for her reporting in Darfur. She has been awarded by Americares, the Anti-Defamation League as a Woman of Achievement, and the Asian American Journalists Association, receiving its National Journalism Award in 2003. She has also won numerous awards for her charity work, primarily for breast cancer research.
Ms. Curry graduated from the University of Oregon School of Journalism in 1978.
In her speeches, Ms. Curry speaks candidly about her climb as a journalist and the perseverance she used to get where she is today. She also discusses the roles and responsibilities of the media in our society today- on politics, on business, and on families. Ms. Curry shares her experiences growing up the daughter of a Japanese-American mother and Caucasian-American father, and openly reveals her personal stories as a working mother.
Ms. Curry resides in New York City.