Jackie Spinner is a professor of journalism at Columbia College Chicago, where she oversees the photojournalism major and broadcast journalism program and is faculty advisor to the Columbia Chronicle. She was a staff writer for The Washington Post for 14 years and covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She is the editor of Gateway Journalism Review and a regular contributor to The Washington Post. 

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In 2010, she returned to Iraq to start the award-winning AUI-S Voice, Iraq’s first independent student newspaper at The American University of Iraq. She was a U.S. Fulbright Scholar in Oman and taught journalism at Sultan Qaboos University in 2010-2011, where she founded Al Mir’ah, the university’s first independent student newspaper. In 2011, she was named Fishback Visiting Writer at Washington and Lee University. She is the author of Tell Them I Didn’t Cry: A young journalist’s story of joy, loss and survival in Iraq (Scribner 2006). Jackie has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan, Oman, Ecuador, Hungary, Spain, Morocco, Finland, Iceland, Israel, Egypt, Palestine and Kuwait.

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She is the director and producer of two documentary films, Don't Forget Me and Morocco, Morocco. Morocco, Morocco aired on PBS in Chicago in 2022.

 

She is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, Journalism and Women’s Symposium, the Online News Association and the Illinois Press Photographers Association.