Alcindor, Yamiche Léone
1986-present · Contribution: 2010-present
Served as PBS NewsHour’s White House correspondent from 2018 to 2022, becoming a leading chronicler of the Trump and early Biden presidencies before succeeding her mentor Gwen Ifill, also profiled in this collection, as moderator of PBS’s Washington Week
Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Impact on the world
After national reporting jobs at Newsday, USA Today, and The New York Times covering the Sandy Hook shooting, the killing of Trayvon Martin, and the Ferguson and Baltimore unrest, Alcindor joined PBS NewsHour as White House correspondent in January 2018, where her pointed questioning of President Trump at press briefings — for which he repeatedly singled her out with public criticism — became a defining feature of the administration’s coverage; the White House Correspondents’ Association honored her with its 2020 Aldo Beckman Award for overall excellence in White House coverage, and the National Association of Black Journalists named her its 2020 Journalist of the Year. In May 2021 she was named the ninth moderator of Washington Week in the program’s history, directly succeeding the three-year tenure of Robert Costa and following the decades-long run of the late Gwen Ifill, whom Alcindor has repeatedly cited as her guiding professional inspiration; the International Women’s Media Foundation created the Gwen Ifill Award in part to honor journalists like Alcindor carrying that legacy forward. She left PBS in early 2022 to join NBC News and MSNBC as a Washington correspondent, continuing to report on the intersection of race, policy, and politics.
Life & background
Born November 1, 1986, in Miami, Florida, to Haitian immigrant parents, Alcindor interned at the Black-owned Westside Gazette and the Miami Herald in high school, earned a bachelor’s degree in English, government, and African American studies from Georgetown University in 2009, and later completed a master’s in broadcast journalism and documentary filmmaking from New York University. She worked at Newsday, USA Today, and The New York Times from 2010 to 2018, served as PBS NewsHour’s White House correspondent from 2018 to 2022 and Washington Week moderator from 2021 to 2023, and has been a Washington correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC since 2022.
Sources
- PBS NewsHour; International Center for Journalists; WETA
More in Press & Photography
Abbott, Robert Sengstacke
1870-1940
Founded the Chicago Defender in 1905 with a 25-cent investment, building it into the most influential Black newspaper in the country and a primary catalyst of the Great Migration of roughly 1.5 million Black Southerners northward
Ball, James Presley
1825-1904
Built one of the first successful African American-owned photography studios in the country, operating “Ball’s Great Daguerrean Gallery of the West” in Cincinnati from 1849 and photographing subjects from Frederick Douglass to Queen Victoria over a 50-year, coast-to-coast career
Barboza, Anthony
1944-present
Built a five-decade commercial and fine-art photography career after joining the Kamoinge Workshop in 1963 as its youngest member, later serving as the collective’s president from 2005 to 2016 and co-editing its landmark 2015 history, Timeless: Photographs by Kamoinge
Barnett, Claude Albert
1889-1967
Founded the Associated Negro Press in 1919, the first sustained national and international wire service built specifically for Black newspapers, which at its peak supplied news, columns, and photographs to roughly 200 African American publications across the United States, the West Indies, and Africa