Tenzin Pema
Tenzin Pema
Tenzin Pema is a Tibetan journalist and newsroom leader with more than two decades of experience. She recently served as director of Radio Free Asia's Tibetan Service, overseeing reporting on the 2024 Dege dam protests and mass arrests, transnational repression and the erosion of Tibetan language and cultural identity.
She previously held leadership roles at The Economic Times and YourStory Media and spent a decade at Reuters covering corporate news and markets. There she created a Middle East news team, the first bilingual team in Reuters' Bengaluru newsroom.
An award-winning journalist recognized for editorial innovation and public-service work, Pema holds a postgraduate diploma in broadcast journalism from the Asian College of Journalism. She is a 2025-26 Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan, where her project examines China's strategy to erode Tibetan cultural, linguistic and historical identity. She is also a poet. Her collection of 21 poems, "A Thousand Parallel Lives," reflects on exile, homeland and Tibetan identity.
Pema said Alfred Friendly Press Partner gave her and other exile journalists “a meaningful period of learning, reflection, and transition” at the University of Missouri.
