Joanna Kakissis
Joanna Kakissis is a foreign correspondent based in Kyiv, Ukraine, where she reports poignant stories of a conflict that has upended millions of lives, affected global energy and food supplies and pitted NATO against Russia.
Kakissis began reporting in Ukraine shortly before Russia invaded in February. She covered the exodus of refugees to Poland and has returned to Ukraine several times to chronicle the war. She has focused on the human costs, profiling the displaced, the families of prisoners of war and a ninety-year-old "mermaid" who swims in a mine-filled sea. Kakissis highlighted the tragedy for both sides with a story about the body of a Russian soldier abandoned in a hamlet he helped destroy, and she shed light on the potential for nuclear disaster with a report on the shelling of Nikopol by Russians occupying a nearby power plant.
Kakissis began reporting regularly for NPR from her base in Athens, Greece, in 2011. Her work has largely focused on the forces straining European unity — migration, nationalism and the rise of illiberalism in Hungary. She led coverage of the eurozone debt crisis and the mass migration of Syrian refugees to Europe. She's reported extensively in central and eastern Europe and has also filled in at NPR bureaus in Berlin, Istanbul, Jerusalem, London and Paris. She's a contributor to This American Life and has written for The New York Times, TIME, The New Yorker online and The Financial Times Magazine, among others. In 2021, she taught a journalism seminar as a visiting professor at Princeton University.
Kakissis was born in Greece, grew up in North and South Dakota and spent her early years in journalism at The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina.
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The Greek coast guard says at least 21 people, including nine children, died Friday after migrant boats sank in the Aegean Sea. -
Slovakia has never been particularly welcoming to migrants and it resisted the most recent influx to Europe. Those who came a generation ago say they are still often seen as outsiders. -
Macedonia is blocking the path of migrants trying to head north, deeper into Europe. Greece is taking them back from the border to Athens, even as hundreds more arrive at the frontier every day. -
Greece is struggling to screen asylum seekers and migrants quickly on the island of Lesbos. Migrants are arriving in record numbers, and the EU wants Greece to accommodate more. -
The strain of coping with asylum seekers on their joint border is causing Serbia and Croatia to invoke retaliatory frontier restrictions — and recall their bitter political history.
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NPR correspondents Ari Shapiro and Joanna Kakissis follow Syrian refugee Monzer Omar as he makes the difficult trip from the Turkish coast to Central Europe in search of a new home. -
In February, NPR published this look at families struggling to stay together amid civil war. The crisis has only intensified since then and we are republishing the original story.
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The ferry Eleftherios Venizeloswill house 2,500 in its rooms and serve as an area where local authorities will be processing paperwork for the thousands of migrants and refugees on Kos in Greece. -
More than 124,000 people have arrived by sea to the Greek islands this year. But Kos, a popular tourist destination, has been the most unprepared for the influx of those in need of refuge. -
The new bailout plan for Greece calls for a steep sales-tax increase on the Aegean Islands, raising fears it could harm tourism, one of the few sectors that's been doing well.
