Lisa de Bode is a journalist based in Antwerp, Belgium. She is also a freelance critic for Kirkus Reviews, and mentors students in the Literary Reportage programme at the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
Most recently, she was a political reporter at De Standaard in Brussels, where she covered immigration and the Flemish Christian Democratic party, and was awarded the 2021 Belfius Press Prize in the Print/Web category as part of a team that exposed 3M's role in polluting local communities with PFAS or "forever chemicals." Before that, she was the managing editor of the digital team at The World, an international news programme co-produced by WGBH, PRX, and formerly the BBC World Service in Boston. Before that, she was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, which featured her work on health, politics, and language in an interview here, and wrote EUROPA أوروپا, An Illustrated Introduction to Europe for Migrants and Refugees, a guidebook spearheaded by Magnum Photos in 2016. That year, she also worked as a field producer for CNNi based in Brussels. From 2013 to 2016, she was a staff reporter at Al Jazeera America in New York City, where her reporting on homeless women's menstrual health spurred Intros 1122-A, 1123-A, and 1128-A in the New York legislature providing free tampons and pads to shelters, prisons, and public schools. In 2014, she won a Society of Professional Journalists award in the Online Non-Deadline Reporting category for her contributions to a series on Native American veterans' mental health. In 2011, she was awarded the Aanmoedigingsprijs Dick Scherpenzeel for young foreign correspondent of the year writing in the Dutch language.
She has also freelanced for outlets such as The New Yorker, The Nation, The Atlantic, and The Village Voice. Some of that reporting has been featured on NPR, ABC, Deutschlandfunk, and ARTE.
Her stories have been taught at Harvard College, translated into French, and supported by the Broad Institute, a 2019 Resilience Journalism Fellowship, a 2017 African Great Lakes Reporting Fellowship, and Fonds Pascal Decroos, among others.
