Speaker

Lisa Ling is currently executive producer and host of This is Life on CNN. For the show, Lisa has explored the scourge of prescription pill addiction in Utah, the recent influx of women in North Dakota’s boomtown and a town in the rural Midwest where young men aspire to be priests.  

For five seasons prior, Ling executive produced and hosted Our America on OWN: the Oprah Winfrey Network.  Lisa embedded in a Midwest town ravaged by an onslaught of heroin, got exclusive access inside an anti-gay religious movement, witnessed the manifestation of PTSD in returning veterans of war and went undercover to investigate the under-age sex trafficking of minors in the nation’s capitol. She has also profiled Americans living beneath the poverty line for the first time and people serving unimaginably lengthy prison sentences for crimes they did not commit.

As the former field correspondent for The Oprah Winfrey Show, contributor to ABC News' Nightline and National Geographic's Explorer, Lisa Ling has reported from dozens of countries, covering stories about gang rape in the Congo, bride burning in India, the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, and the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang in Central America among other issues that are too often ignored.

Lisa got her start in journalism as a correspondent for Channel One News where she covered the civil war in Afghanistan at 21 years of age as well as stories in dozens of countries around the world.  She later went on to become a co-host of ABC Daytime's hit show The View, which won its first daytime Emmy during her time at the show.

Lisa is the co-author of Mother, Daughter, Sister, Bride: Rituals of Womanhood and Somewhere Inside: One Sister's Captivity in North Korea and the Other's Fight to Bring Her Home, which she penned with her sister, Laura.