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Gwen Ifill

About Gwen

In Memoriam: Gwen Ifill was the moderator and managing editor of "Washington Week" and co-anchor and managing editor for "The PBS NEWSHOUR w/ Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff."

The best-selling author of "The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama," (Doubleday, 2009), she also moderated the Vice Presidential debates during the Presidential elections in 2004 and 2008.

Gwen covered eight Presidential campaigns, and during the 2008 campaign season, won the George Foster Peabody Award after bringing Washington Week to live audiences around the country as part of a 10-city tour.

Now in its 49th year, Washington Week is the longest-running prime-time news and public affairs program on television. Each week, Gwen brought together some of the best journalists in Washington to discuss the major stories of the week with the reporters who actually cover the news that emanates from the nation's capital and affects the nation and the world.

Gwen joined both Washington Week and PBS NewsHour in 1999, interviewing newsmakers and reporting on issues ranging from foreign affairs to politics. Before coming to PBS, she was chief congressional and political correspondent for NBC News, White House correspondent for The New York Times, and a local and national political reporter for The Washington Post. She also reported for the Baltimore Evening Sun and the Boston Herald American.

"I always knew I wanted to be a journalist, and my first love was newspapers," Ifill said. "But public broadcasting provides the best of both worlds-combining the depth of newspapering with the immediate impact of broadcast television."

A native of New York City and a graduate of Simmons College in Boston, Ifill received more than 25 honorary doctorates. In 2015 she was awarded with the National Press Club's highest honor, the Fourth Estate Award. She has also been honored for her work by the Radio and Television News Directors Association, Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center, The National Association of Black Journalists, Ohio University, and was included in Ebony Magazine's list of 150 Most Influential African Americans.

She also served on the board of the News Literacy Project, on the advisory board of the Committee to Protect Journalists and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Remembering Gwen Ifill

Full Bio

Gwen’s Recent Stories

Politics May 25

2012: The Year Demographics Catches up With Politics

Christine Mastin, an immigration attorney whose Spanish-speaking grandmother emigrated from Chile to the United States, realizes that most of the Hispanics she knows are surprised she is a Republican. Barack Obama won two-thirds of the Latino vote in 2008, and…

Politics Apr 06

Avoiding the Veepstakes (Not Really)

With the Republican primary campaign approaching its end, and more than two weeks before the next voting, there is immense temptation to begin speculating about running mates. I will resist. That seems the respectful thing to do when there are…

Politics Mar 16

Politics by the Numbers: Countdown to Chaos

Almost every Tuesday night this year, political junkies everywhere have gathered by the flickering light of their computer screens. We have pored over exit polls, tallied the minutes until results from Vermont to Hawaii and crunched delegate allocations. Invariably, we…

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