Ellen Barry

Ellen Barry is the New Delhi-based South Asia bureau chief for The New York Times. She covered the rise of Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist leader whose election brought an end to decades of rule by the Indian National Congress. She wrote narratives about the struggles of Indian women – day laborers and factory workers – to earn for themselves and gaining influence within a patriarchal system. She also wrote about dog racing in neo-feudal Punjab, the dead bodies found unattended every year in Delhi, and a murder case in one of the world’s most isolated indigenous tribes.

Before India, Ms. Barry was a correspondent and then bureau chief for The Times in Moscow. She arrived during a tentative thaw between the United States and Russia, which ended abruptly on the day in the fall of 2012 when Vladimir Putin announced he would return to the presidency, allowing him to rule for as long as Stalin or Brezhnev.

While in Russia, she was part of a team which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for a series on impunity in the country’s justice system. She also covered the resurgence of Russia’s Cossacks, a meteor that slammed into the atmosphere above Chelyabinsk and a scandal that erupted at the Bolshoi Ballet, when an enraged dancer threw acid into the face of the artistic director.

Before joining The Times, Ms. Barry was Atlanta bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, and a reporter at the Boston Globe and the Boston Phoenix. She reported on the 2001 terrorist attack on New York, and covered wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Ms. Barry grew up in a Foreign Service family, and lived as a child in the Soviet Union and Bulgaria. After college, she moved to Russia and worked at the Moscow Times. She is married to Keith Wilson, and is the mother of two daughters, Alice and June.