Barbara Serra is an award-winning journalist, documentary filmmaker and author. She has been presenting on Sky News since October 2003.
From 2006 to 2022 she anchored Al Jazeera English’s flagship Newshour programme from London, and reported extensively from Europe and the Middle East. She started her career at the BBC and Channel 5 News, 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, 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 writes the Substack newsletter News with a Foreign Accent, which looks at 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. She also mentors and trains second-language English journalists facing linguistic and cultural obstacles in English-language newsrooms.
