Soledad O’Brien

Soledad O’Brien is an award-winning documentarian, journalist, speaker, author, and philanthropist. She serves as the CEO of Starfish Media Group, a multi-platform media production company she founded in 2013, dedicated to telling empowering and authentic stories on a range of social issues. She is a thought leader whose public engagement garners wide attention.

O’Brien has had a national impact with her books and speeches and her presence on the nation’s op-ed pages and social media, particularly Twitter, where she has over 1 million followers. She was named to Crain’s New York Business “40 Under 40” list in 2004.

O’Brien currently anchors and produces the Hearst Television political magazine program Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien, which is distributed by Sony Pictures. She also reports regularly for HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.” She co-taught a Harvard University Graduate School of Education class on “Advancing the Public Understanding of Education” in 2014. In addition to this, she joined HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel sports news magazine as a correspondent in 2013. In 2023, she collaborated with actor and film director Rob Reiner on a podcast series to cover the controversial topic, “Who Killed JFK?”

She has anchored shows on CNN, MSNBC, and NBC, and hosted projects for Fox and A&E. O’Brien has contributed to the three major broadcast networks, Oxygen, Nat Geo, the PBS NewsHour, and WebMD. In her earlier career, she started in journalism as a medical reporter on WXKS-FM in Boston and moved on to join NBC News in 1991. She co-anchored CNN’s “American Morning” from 2003 to 2007 and the CNN program, “Starting Point” from 2012 to 2013.

O’Brien is recognized with numerous awards for her impactful reporting. She won the Journalist of the Year award from the National Association of Black Journalists and received two Peabody Awards for CNN’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Oil Spill. She received another Peabody Award in 2022 for the documentary “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.” In addition to this, she was honored with the Goodermote Humanitarian Award by the Bloomberg School and the Freedom’s Voice Awards Gala from the Morehouse School of Medicine.

Upon founding Starfish Media Group, she continued to produce documentaries and series on topics that included youth incarceration, police brutality, veterans with PTSD, and the opioid epidemic for Al Jazeera, CNN, and the PBS NewsHour. In 2021, she testified at a House Committee on Ethics subcommittee hearing on disinformation and extremism in the media.

O’Brien frequently speaks on a variety of social issues at college campuses and corporate events. She has served as the Chair of the Board for The After-School Corporation (now ExpandED Schools), and as a director on the boards of the Rand Corporation and the National Archives. She is also a member of the PowHERful Foundation Board. In 2013, she was named a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Harvard University Graduate School of Education.

She is the author of two books, her critically acclaimed memoir “The Next Big Story” and “Latino in America.” In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, O’Brien and her husband, Brad, created the PowHERful Foundation to help young women get to and through college. The foundation hosts the PowHERful conferences that support hundreds of young women with mentoring programs, professional advice, and other services. She lives in New York with her husband and four children.