Lydia Polgreen

Lydia Frances Polgreen (born 1975) is an American journalist. She is best known for having been the editor-in-chief of HuffPost. She also spent about one year between 2021 and 2022 as the head of content for Gimlet Media. Prior to that she was editorial director of NYT Global at The New York Times, and the West Africa bureau chief for the same publication, based in Dakar, Senegal, from 2005 to 2009. She also reported from India. She spent much of her early career in Johannesburg, South Africa where she was The New York Times South African Bureau Chief as well. In 2022, after leaving Gimlet, she returned to The New York Times as an opinion columnist.

She has received many honors and awards, among them, the 2009 Livingston Award for Excellence in International Reporting and, in 2011, the Medal for Excellence from Columbia University.

Education
Polgreen graduated from St. John's College in 1997 and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2000.

Career
She started working at The New York Times in 2002.

In 2006, she received a George Polk Award in Foreign Reporting from Long Island University for her coverage of ethnic violence in the Darfur region of Sudan.

In February 2008, she covered the Battle of N'Djamena in Chad. Some of her work in N’Djamena was illustrated by the French freelance photographer Benedicte Kurzen.

In April 2016, she became the editorial director of NYT Global for The New York Times. On December 6, 2016, she left The New York Times to succeed the founder of The Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington, as editor-in-chief.

In 2021, she was named to Fast Company's Queer 50 list.

Personal life
Polgreen's mother is originally from Ethiopia, and her father is a white American.

Polgreen is married to Candace Feit, a documentary photographer. In November 2017, Polgreen was nominated to Out magazine's "OUT100" for 2017 in recognition of her work and her visibility. Rejecting rigid binaries, she identifies herself as both Black and mixed race; as both American and African; as a woman, although her masculine gender expression results in people often assuming she is a man; and as a lesbian who has also had heterosexual romantic relationships.