Barbara Serra is an award-winning journalist, TV presenter, documentary-maker and author.
From 2006 to 2022 she presented Al Jazeera English’s flagship NewsHour programme from the channel’s European headquarters in London, and reported extensively from Europe and the Middle East. She was previously a reporter/presenter for Sky News, BBC and Channel 5, where she became the first non-native English speaker to present a primetime news programme on British television.
In 2020 Barbara co-produced, wrote and presented the documentary Fascism in the Family for Al Jazeera, looking at her own family’s fascist history to assess the influence that fascism exerts in modern-day Italy. The film won both the Current Affairs and History categories at the New York Festival’s Film and Television awards. She is writing a book based on the documentary.
Barbara is based in London but is also a prominent journalist in her native Italy. In 2019 she was awarded a Knighthood of the Order of the Star of Italy for her journalism by the President of the Italian Republic.
She writes the Substack newsletter News with a Foreign Accent, in which she explores the challenges of being second-language English and the impact that English as the global language has on the international media’s perception of world affairs.
