Maryam Ishani

Maryam Ishani is an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker with 20 years of experience covering war, peace, and reconciliation

for The Guardian, BBC, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse. Her field reporting has aired on CNN, BBC, and France24.

An Iranian-Canadian born in Ahvaz during the Iran-Iraq war, Maryam brings rare personal stakes to her reporting. Her family fled Iran when she was six, and she has spent her career bearing witness to the conflicts that shape the lives of civilians, particularly children, across the Middle East, Asia Pacific, and beyond.

A gradute of Columbia University, she began at the United Nations in New York, serving as a Monitor and Reporter for the Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict at the Security Council. From there, she moved into the field: covering the Arab Spring for Foreign Policy, the US invasion of Iraq for Reuters, and the rise of Al Qaeda in Yemen for The Guardian. As an AFP staff journalist, she reported on Hong Kong's democracy movement and Iran's nuclear diplomacy. She was part of the team that helped draft Tunisia's first Freedom of Information Act, a model for post-Arab Spring constitutional reform across the region, and served as Country Director for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, building the conflict reporting capacity of news teams in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

Today, Maryam is one of a small number of journalists working at the intersection of traditional field reporting and open-source intelligence. Her AFP coverage of the US-Israel-Iran conflict integrates OSINT verification, social media analysis, and on-the-ground sourcing to track battlefield developments, internet blackouts, humanitarian crises, and the IRGC's intensifying persecution of Iran's Bahá'í minority. Her reporting reflects the full complexity of a region shaped by decades of political trauma, generational fracture, and shifting power dynamics.

In 2017, she directed her first feature documentary, Changing the World, One Wall at a Time, about the world's largest global street art campaign for the right to education, including for Bahá'í minorities in Iran.

Alongside her journalism, Maryam is the co-founder and Chief Content Officer of Conscioushood, a character-education platform built around 20 human virtues. Conscioushood works with educators, parents, and institutions to nurture the next generation of brave, just, empathetic, and principled leaders through card decks, school programs, workshops, and digital tools.

Her sub-specialties include the impact of war on civilians, radicalization, climate-driven conflict across Yemen, Egypt, Iraq, the Sahel, and the Asia Pacific, and education in emergency zones.