Ariel Sophia Bardi is a journalist and academic focused on culture and human rights.

Born in Japan, and raised in the UK and US, she has lived, worked, or reported in France, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Israel and the West Bank, Kenya, Uganda, India, Italy, Armenia, Sri Lanka, Mexico, and Nepal. She holds a doctorate from Yale University, where her research looked at the rise of nationalist leaderships in India and Israel through the lens of architecture, landscape, and space.

Other projects have tracked the ecological impact of tourism in the high Himalayas, pasture degradation in the Central Asian steppe, a shamanist revival in India’s Northeast, and aid efforts along the Lebanese-Syrian border. Her essays and reported dispatches have appeared in The Guardian, Foreign Policy, LA Review of Books, BBC, Aeon, France 24, Al Jazeera, and The Atlantic, among many others.

She has received fellowships from the James Foley Foundation and Logan Nonfiction and Documentary Program and was a 2022 “Words of Witness” fellow in the Under the Volcano residency program and a 2023 Middle East fellow at Moment Institute. Currently, she teaches in the journalism department of Temple University Rome and has worked as a consultant at both the World Bank and United Nations.

Rome, Italy

arielbardi@gmail.com