Christina Goldbaum is the Afghanistan & Pakistan bureau chief for The New York Times. Before joining the Times in 2018, she reported from Sub-Saharan Africa and received the Livingston Award for International Reporting, the National Press Club's Edwin M. Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence and the Frontline Club’s Print Journalism Award.
Christina began her career at The Cape Times newspaper in South Africa and later moved to Nairobi, Kenya as a freelance journalist. She has written about female soldiers in the African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia; political violence and protests in Kenya; the ousting of strongman Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe; an attempted coup d'état in Burundi; and Russia’s economic investments across the African continent.
In 2017, Christina moved to Mogadishu, Somalia where she spent over a year reporting on climate change, women’s rights and terrorism. She earned multiple awards for her investigative series about a U.S. military operation that resulted in the deaths of 10 Somali civilians, including one child.
As a correspondent for the New York Times, Christina reported from New York and Southern Africa before joining the Kabul bureau in 2021. Since then, she has ridden along with smugglers, embedded with rebels fighting the Taliban, traveled with migrants fleeing the country and reported from villages-turned-islands during record-breaking floods. Previously she reported for Foreign Policy, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, AFP, The Daily Beast, PBS Newshour and VICE on HBO among others as a freelance journalist.
Christina was part of the team of reporters that won the Overseas Press Clubs’ Hal Boyle Award for coverage of the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 as well as the team that won a Loeb Award for coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. She has also been a finalist for an Editor and Publisher Award and the One World Media Awards "Women's Rights Reporting" Award and "New Voice" Award.
Originally from Washington D.C., she holds a B.A. in political science from Tufts University. She speaks conversational Spanish and Swahili.