Lydia Frances Polgreen (born 1975) is an American journalist. 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.[1][2] She spent much of her early career in Johannesburg, South Africa where she was The New York Times South African Bureau Chief as well. She was editor-in-chief of HuffPost from 2016 to 2020,[3] after which she spent about one year between 2021 and 2022 as the head of content for Gimlet Media.[4] In 2022, after leaving Gimlet, she returned to The New York Times as an opinion columnist.[5]
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.[6]
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.[8] On December 6, 2016, she left The New York Times to succeed the founder of The Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington,[8] as editor-in-chief.[9]
Polgreen's mother is originally from Ethiopia,[11] and her father is a white American.[12]
Polgreen is married to Candace Feit, a documentary photographer.[13] In November 2017, Polgreen was nominated to Out magazine's "OUT100" for 2017 in recognition of her work and visibility.[14] Rejecting rigid binaries, she identifies as both Black and mixed race; as both American and African; as a woman, though her masculine gender expression often leads people to assume she is a man; and as a lesbian, though she has also had heterosexual romantic relationships.[12]
^ abPolgreen, Lydia (1 December 2023). "There Is No Way to Live a Life Without Regret". The New York Times. Personally, I have never had much use for binaries. I was born to a Black African mother and a white American father, the beginning of a life that has included many identities and many hyphens, and doubtless will include more with the passage of time and the ever-gathering tumbleweeds of experience. I am Black but also mixed race; I am a woman but the way I look and dress means I'm constantly taken for a man; I'm American but also African, but not African American in the sense that that term is usually used; I am a lesbian but had happy (and unhappy) romantic relationships with boys and men in my youth.
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