Key Facts
Career & Education
About
Rukmini Maria Callimachi is a Romanian-born American investigative journalist renowned for her reporting on terrorism and extremism, particularly the Islamic State (ISIS). She immigrated to the United States as a child and began her career with the Associated Press before joining The New York Times in 2010, where she specializes in in-depth coverage of ISIS operations, propaganda, and human trafficking, often reporting from conflict zones in the Middle East and North Africa, including Iraq and Syria. Her work has earned multiple accolades, including four Pulitzer Prize finalist nominations. In 2018, she hosted the acclaimed New York Times podcast 'Caliphate,' which won a Peabody Award but was later partially retracted in 2020 after an internal investigation raised doubts about the veracity of key elements. Beyond journalism, she is also a poet and writer with early publications in literary magazines, and her multilingual background and personal experiences inform her empathetic yet rigorous storytelling approach. She has collaborated with experts like Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi in her reporting on terrorist networks.