34 years ago, Julia Ioffe and her family arrived in the U.S. as refugees from the former Soviet Union, having fled their homeland upon rumors of a planned pogrom against the Jews of Moscow. Julia was only seven.  

Today, Julia Ioffe, the refugee –- a happy American accident, as she has called her life -- has become a go-to journalist for her singular insights on Vladimir Putin and Russia, and her reporting on the war in Ukraine, the Middle East, U.S. national security and domestic politics.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, PBS’s Frontline turned to Ioffe as a central voice in its documentary Putin’s Road To War. So did Late Night with Stephen Colbert. 

Ioffe graduated from Princeton, and later received a Fulbright Scholarship to return to Russia, where she worked as a Moscow correspondent for Foreign Policy magazine and The New Yorker and, among other things, introduced American readers to a young Russian opposition figure she had gotten to know well — Alexey Navalny. Back in the U.S., she became a senior editor at The New Republic, and a featured reporter at The Atlantic. In 2021, she joined the new platform Puck.news as a founding partner and Washington correspondent.

About Michael Schulder: 

I am sitting down to write this short bio during a fraught time in our nation and world. That sentence is, what we journalists call, evergreen. 

But fraught does not mean hopeless. And fraught does not mean joyless. 

I created Wavemaker Conversations in 2013, after many years in the heart of network news, to better understand our world and our human challenges and potential — to discover important things I’d never noticed, and to share the wisdom.
 
These in-depth conversations — distributed on my podcast, videos, newsletter, and at live events — feature some of the most knowledgeable or talented or inspiring or just plain fascinating people imaginable.
 
Sometimes they’re big names. Often they’re under the radar — at least for a general audience.

They include historians and historic figures, athletes and coaches, experts on conflict resolution, political players and performing artists, leaders in journalism and medicine and mental health (I can’t resist a free conversation with a therapist.) Many Wavemaker guests are preeminent authors, some of whom I have the joy of interviewing each June at the Nantucket Book Festival.

My time in network news included five years as a Writer for Peter Jennings at ABC World News Tonight and seventeen years as a Senior Executive Producer at CNN. I graduated from Vassar, where I received a liberal arts education — which I continue to pursue through my journalism. 

I never know exactly where a Wavemaker Conversation will lead, because they all are driven by curiosity. But no matter how fraught the subject matter, they often arrive at a place where curiosity meets hope.