Clarissa Ward Biography
Clarissa Ward is a British-American Emmy award-winning Anchor/Reporter, Correspondent, and Author working for CNN. She serves as a chief international correspondent. She joined the network in September 2015.
Clarissa Ward Age
Ward is 41 years old as of 2021. She was born on January 31, 1980, in London, United Kindom. She celebrates her birthday on the 31st of January every year.
Clarissa Ward Height
Ward stands at a height of 5 feet 11 inches tall.
Clarissa Ward Family
Ward’s father is known as Rodney Ward while her mother’s name is Donna Ward who happens to be an interior designer. However, she has not disclosed any information about whether or not she has any siblings as she likes to keep her personal life private.
Clarissa Ward Husband
Ward is married to Philipp von Bernstorf who happens to be a fund manager. The couple met in 2007, at a dinner party in Moscow, and later on, in November 2016, they tied the knot at London’s Chelsea Old Town Hall. Together the couple has been blessed with two children namely; Ezra Albrecht Nikolas Nour who was born on March 2, 2018, and Caspar Hugo Augustus Idris who was born on 29 June 2020.
Clarissa Ward Net Worth
Ward has an estimated net worth of between $1 Million – $5 Million which she has earned through her career as a chief international correspondent.
Clarissa Ward Salary
Ward earns an annual salary ranging from $ 45,000 – $ 110,500.
Clarissa Ward Career
Ward works for CNN in Atlanta, Georgia as a chief international correspondent. She began her journalism career as an intern at CNN’s Moscow bureau in 2002. She once served as a news correspondent for ABC News programs in Moscow. Later on, she joined CBS News which is based in London. Additionally, she did a report on the Turkish incursion which helped her earn an Emmy Award in the Outstanding Breaking News Coverage category in 2020.
In her career as a journalist, she has reported from the front lines across the world from Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Ukraine to Georgia during 2008, Russian incursion, and Iran for over fifteen years. In her career, she has received numerous awards for her reporting such as; two Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Awards, two Edward R. Murrow Awards for distinguished journalism, the 2017 David Kaplan Award from the Overseas Press Club, honors from the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association, Two George Foster Peabody Award, and seven Emmy Awards.
Furthermore, she is expected to receive a Ted Sorensen Award from Network 20/20 in recognition for “adeptly crafting the first draft of history and providing original insight into the people and events of our time.” For her outstanding war reporting in hotspots such as Syria and Iraq, the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) awarded her the prestigious Excellence in International Reporting Award in the year 2016.
She also made an undercover trip to Syria’s rebel-held areas where it had been over a year since any journalist stepped foot. On the same day of her arrival to the area, she was able to witness an airstrike on a fruit market that left 11 dead. She also reported on the livelihood of the people there under the Russian and regime bombardment.
This report has been awarded an Edward R. Murrow Award for ‘News Series’, the Overseas Press Club’s David Kaplan Award, and a Peabody Award. She stated that there are no winners in Aleppo in a UN Security Council meeting when she was requested to address the issue on the embattled Syrian city in August 2016, after being one of the last Western reporters to visit rebel-held Aleppo.
She interviewed two Western fighters about why they joined the jihad in Syria in 2014, while she was on an undercover assignment. One of the two jihads was a young Somali-American from the Midwest and this made her the only Western journalist to have interviewed an American jihadist fighter inside Syria since the civil war began. She challenged leaders like Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in 2013, and United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012, in interviews while she was at CBS on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal crackdown inside Syria.
For ABC News, she spent two years in Moscow and two years in Beijing before she joined CBS. an Emmy award was given to her for Business and Financial Reporting after she covered 2008, the global food crisis, and 2011, earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Additionally, she worked for Fox News Channel while she was based in the Middle East. During this time, she covered the execution of Saddam Hussein and other key stories in the area. Furthermore, she interviewed notable figures such as Lebanese President Emile Lahoud and General David Petraeus.
From then on she has been based in areas such as Beijing, Moscow, London, New York, Moscow, and Baghdad. In addition, she is eloquent in Italian and French, conversational Russian, Spanish and Arabic, and basic Mandarin. When coming to her education, she attended Yale University where she graduated. Additionally, she holds an honorary doctor of letters degree from Middlebury College.
Clarissa Ward Book / Author
Ward is the author of the book “On All Fronts: The Education of a Journalist”. The book gives details about her singular career as a conflict reporter and how she has documented the violent remaking of the world from close range.
Clarissa Ward CNN
Ward serves at CNN as a chief international correspondent. Over the years, she has covered various breaking stories. She did a joint investigation with Bellingcat on the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, and she was able to uncover new evidence that identified the Russian security services who trailed Navalny for more than thirty trips over the course of three years.
She did her investigation in late 2020. In Germany at an undisclosed location, she interviewed Navalny. During the interview, she showed him photos of the agents that tracked him. Furthermore, she went ahead to confront a suspected member of the elite toxins team at his home outside Moscow. The Gracies named her the Reporter and Correspondent of the Year in 2019.
When there were Russian trolls operating in the West African nations of Ghana and Nigeria, she did an investigation on ‘Russia’s Secret Influence Campaigns’ that took a month last year. The Russian trolls wanted to stoke racial tensions and stir up social unrest in the United States.
In her investigation, she had to travel to one of the operation’s headquarters in Ghana, and interview one of the trolls, additionally, she also was able to trace the Ghanaian running the operation who resided in Russia. on the 2021 Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Award, her finding on Russia’s Secret Influence Campaigns was a finalist.
She contributed to the crisis between the United States and Iran in early 2020, tracking the story from the United States, Iraq inclusive of the site of an Iranian missile attack, and Ukraine with every major development, and contributing to CNN’s breaking news coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Additionally, she was in Syria in 2019, when Turkey launched a military operation targeting America’s Kurdish partners in northern Syria. In her report, she covered the chaos of civilians fleeing their homes after the military strike. In 2020, she won an Emmy Award in the Outstanding Breaking News Coverage category for her reporting on the Turkish incursion.
For CNN, she did a two-part Emmy Award-winning investigative report ‘Putin’s Private Army’ in 2019, on Russia’s use of mercenaries for a month. During her investigations, she was able to interview Russia’s most notorious private military contractor who is a former fighter for Wagner, and capture the first interview on-camera.
Furthermore, she was able to have a view of the growing Russian mercenary activity when she traveled to the Central African Republic. Together with her team, they received intimidation by a car full of Russians who had followed them after they had visited a diamond mine with ties to a Russian oligarch. It did not end at that, a Russian media propaganda campaign tried to discredit their reporting after it was released.
After her report on Russia’s use of mercenaries, she was able to gain unprecedented access to Taliban-controlled territory in Afghanistan. She did an exclusive report alongside Salma Abdelaziz CNN’s field producer. The report ’36 Hours with the Taliban’ required them to spend time at a local madrasa, where many of the children pored over their Qurans, and a Taliban-run clinic in the village of Pashma Qala.
Later on, she was able to obtain exclusive footage that showed a Saudi operative posing as Khashoggi in an attempt to cover up the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, which she covered extensively. a Golden Nymph from the Monte Carlo Television Festival in 2019, was awarded to her for her report on Khashoggi’s body double. Prior to a prestigious 2020 Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Award being dedicated to CNN’s overall coverage of Khashoggi’s murder.
Shadow Over Europe was a CNN investigation that was fronted by her. The investigation was aimed at investigating the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe in 2018. For the investigation, she was obligated to travel to Germany, France, and Poland so as to have a view of how these countries dealt with the rise of anti-Semitic incidents and stereotypes. Additionally, in the News Series category for Television Networks, ‘Shadow Over Europe’ was recognized with a 2019 Edward R. Murrow Award.
Ward is working at CNN where she works alongside other famous CNN anchors and reporters including;
- Anderson Cooper
- Guillermo Arduino
- Carl Azuz
- Jeffy Zeleny
- Julian Zelizer
- Jeff Zucker
- Vanessa Yurkevich
- Ryan Young
- Jasmine Wright
- Fareed Zakaria
- Fredricka Whitefield
- Whitney Wild
- Coy Wire
- Ben Westcott
- Nick Watt
- Bill Weir
- Ben Wedeman
- Hines Ward
- Ivan Watson
- Bianna Golodryga
- Brooke Baldwin
Clarissa Ward Social Media Platforms
Ward is active on her social media accounts and is often seen posting on her Instagram, and Twitter. She has over 164k followers on Twitter and over 56k followers on Instagram.
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