Ann M. Simmons

Ann M. Simmons is The Wall Street Journal's Moscow Bureau Chief, where she covers the political, social and economic intricacies of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

She has spent three decades reporting from Europe, Africa, the Middle East and North America. Most recently, she was a writer/editor covering global development at the Los Angeles Times, where she earlier served as bureau chief in Nairobi and Johannesburg.

Ann was part of a team of Los Angeles Times reporters whose coverage of wildfires in Southern California won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news in 2004.

A longtime student of Russia, Ann was first based in Moscow for Time Magazine in the early 1990s, where she reported on the aborted coup against former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, the rise to power of Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the breakup of the U.S.S.R.

Before Time, she was a staff writer at the Miami Herald, where she started as an intern.

Born and raised in London, Ann holds a double honors bachelor’s degree in Russian and Norwegian from the University of East Anglia and a master's from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She was a Nieman journalism fellow at Harvard, and was selected as the James H. Ottaway Sr. Visiting Professor of Journalism at SUNY New Paltz in 2018 and as the Zubrow Distinguished Visiting Journalist in the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell in 2022.