About Paisley

About

Paisley Dodds

Paisley is an investigative journalist and editor with more than 20 years of experience holding institutions to account — from the detention camps of Guantánamo Bay to the corridors of the United Nations. She has reported from conflict zones, cultivated hard-to-get sources in intelligence and security circles, built and run newsrooms across multiple continents, mentored the next generation of reporters, and looked for ways to use AI to free up the reporting firepower that makes storytelling shine.

The bulk of her career has been at The Associated Press, where she served as London Bureau Chief for a decade, Caribbean News Editor, and as a lead reporter on AP’s International Investigations Team. She has won the George Polk Award, the Joseph L. Brechner Award, and the Hugh Hefner First Amendment Award — all for investigations that held powerful institutions to account. She has also reported on terrorism and security across Europe and the Middle East, broken global intelligence stories, and worked in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Cuba, Israel, and South Africa.

After her time at AP, as Investigations Editor at The New Humanitarian, she reported as well as commissioned and edited accountability journalism focused on the multibillion-dollar aid sector — exposing WHO sexual abuse scandals, Oxfam misconduct, and the systematic exploitation of women in humanitarian crises. That thread — what happens to women, and particularly women of color, when institutions fail them — runs through most of the work she is proudest of.

Paisley holds a master’s in international relations from Cambridge and dual US/UK citizenship.

She is currently completing the Ira A. Lipman Fellowship in Civil and Human Rights Reporting at Columbia Journalism School, finishing a long-form investigation into how healthcare policy failures, land loss, and economic displacement are threatening the survival of the Gullah Geechee community on South Carolina’s Sea Islands.