ANN M. SIMMONS

Journalist and writer

Ann M. Simmons is an award-winning British-American journalist with superior knowledge of international affairs and expertise in Russia and the former Soviet empire. Her more than three decades of journalism experience extends across Europe, Africa, the Middle East and North America.

As Moscow bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, Ann covered the political, social and economic complexities of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, life under his autocratic regime and his aims to reshape Europe’s security architecture. During her most recent five years on the ground in Moscow, she led a team of correspondents reporting on Russia's military and defense sector, the volatility of the country’s sanctions-saddled economy and President Putin’s efforts to promote Russian domination on the world stage. The bureau’s brief also included documenting the repression in Belarus under the leadership of autocrat Alexander Lukashenko, political upheaval in Central Asia and conflict in the South Caucasus.

A longtime student of Russia, Ann was first a reporter in Moscow for TIME magazine in the early 1990s, where she covered the aborted coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the breakup of the USSR and Russia’s efforts to transform from a socialist to market-oriented economy.

Ann was previously a writer/editor covering global development at the Los Angeles Times, where she earlier served as bureau chief in Nairobi and Johannesburg. She has been on the frontlines of many of the world’s most important news stories in recent decades, including the War in Iraq, the Syrian refugee crisis and Hurricane Katrina. She was part of a team of Los Angeles Times reporters whose coverage of wildfires in Southern California won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News in 2004.

Ann's passion for reporting is matched by her enthusiasm for helping to coach and educate future generations of aspiring journalists. She has instructed senior tutorials at the Department of Journalism at California State University, Northridge. She was selected as the Fall 2022 Zubrow Distinguished Visiting Journalist Fellow at Cornell University and as the James H. Ottaway Sr. Visiting Professor of Journalism at State University of New York at New Paltz in 2018.

Born and raised in London, Ann holds a double honors Bachelor of Arts degree in Russian and Norwegian from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and a Master of Science from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York. She was a Nieman journalism fellow at Harvard University, class of 2002-2003.