Ilene Prusher is the Director of the MA program in Journalism at the University of Miami and Assistant Professor of Practice. Prusher also spearheads news-academic partnerships in the School of Communication, including CommunityWire.Miami.
Before coming to the University of Miami, Prusher spent 10 years teaching journalism at Florida Atlantic University, where she was the founder and digital director of MediaLab@FAU. This news-academic partnership has led to dozens of journalism students having their work published by new partners across Florida. Under Prusher’s leadership, MediaLab won a $100,000 grant from Press Forward, a nationwide philanthropic initiative to strengthen communities by reinvigorating local news.
Prusher is an award-winning journalist and author who spent two decades abroad as a foreign correspondent. After completing her first master’s degree at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she chose to focus on international affairs, specifically the Middle East and Asia. As a staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor from 1996-2010, she covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Prusher served as Monitor’s bureau chief in Jerusalem, Istanbul and Tokyo. She was Jerusalem correspondent for TIME (2013-2015), a columnist and feature writer for Haaretz, and a podcast host on TLV1 Radio. Her work has also been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Ms., CNN, NBC NewsThink, FiveThirtyEight, The Forward and Moment. She has served as a guest commentator on international affairs on CNN, BBC, MSNBC, NPR, C-SPAN and Fox News.
Prusher is the author of the novel Baghdad Fixer (Halban Publishers, London, 2012; Trafalgar Square Publishing, Chicago, 2014) and in May 2025 earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida Atlantic University.
In addition to launching ieiMedia’s newest journalism program in London, Prusher has led study abroad programs in Israel, Germany and Poland.