Farai Chideya

Television news reporter Farai Chideya was born in Baltimore, Maryland to Cynthia and Lucas Chideya. She received her B.A. degree in English from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1990.

That same year, Chideya was hired as a reporter for Newsweek Magazine in New York, New York. Then, in 1994, she joined VIBE magazine as a political reporter. Chideya worked as a writer for MTV News and as a political analyst for CNN in 1995. In 1997, she served as a reporter for ABC News for two years. After leaving ABC News, she worked as a political columnist for Syndicated in 1999. Chideya also served as a host of Oxygen Media in 2000. In 2004, she became an NPR affiliate radio station host and then worked as NPR’s News & Notes host in Los Angeles, California in 2006. In 2008, Chideya was hired as a visiting professor at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. In 2015, Chideya worked as a senior writer for FiveThirtyEight.Com in New York City. She founded Diaspora Farms Media, LLC in 2020.

Chideya started her blog, Pop and Politics, in 1995, and published Don’t Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation about African Americans that same year. Her other published works include, The Color of Our Future, Trust: Reaching the 100 Million Voters, Kiss the Sky, Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology, co-written with Vivek Wadhwa, and The Episodic Career: How to Thrive at Work in the Age of Disruption. Chideya worked on several podcasts including One with Farai in 2014 and Our Body Politic in 2020.

Chideya served on the Journalism Advisory Committee for the Knight Foundation and as a program officer on the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression team.

Chideya has received multiple awards and honors, including a National Education Reporting Award from the Education Writers Association in 1994, a Distinguished Alumni Award from Harvard University in 2000, the North Star News Prize in 2006, the Enterprise Reporting Award from the National Association of Black Journalists in 2007, and a special award from the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association in 2008. Chideya completed multiple fellowships, including a Freedom Forum Media Studies Center Fellowship in 1996, a Knight Foundation Fellowship in 2001, a Foreign Press Fellowship for Japan in 2002, a fellowship at the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in 2012, and a fellowship at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy in 2017. Chideya became a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University in 2012, where she worked until 2016.

Farai Chideya was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on February 24, 2023.