Iason Athanasiadis

Writer, photographer and television producer, Iason Athanasiadis has been covering the Middle East, Central Asia and the southeast Mediterranean since 1999. He earned degrees in Arabic and Modern Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford University (BA) as well as Persian and Contemporary Iranian Studies at Tehran’s School of International Studies (MA). In 2008, he was a Nieman fellow at Harvard University and is an Aristotle Onassis Foundation scholar.  

Athanasiadis lived in Iran from 2004-2007, covering conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Lebanon for the international media including the Times, the Christian Science Monitor, American Prospect, British Journalism Review and the South China Morning Post. He covered the 2003 invasion of Iraq from Qatar for al-Jazeera, the 2004 Athens Olympics for BBC World and the 2006 Israeli-Hizbullah war in Lebanon as a freelancer. At the same time, his photography has been featured in solo exhibitions in Germany, Greece, Iran and the US, while his work is published in Der Spiegel, the Los Angeles Times and Art Week.