Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York City. He was previously dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a fellow at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University, a member of the Pacific Council, a regular participant in the World Economic Forum at Davos and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He has worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, covered the war in Indochina as a journalist and traveled widely in China.
He has written for numerous magazines and newspapers and authored over fifteen books, eleven of them about China. His most recent book is My Old Home: A Novel of Exile (2021). Schell serves on the boards of Human Rights Watch, the Sundance Documentary Fund jury and the Social Science Research Council. He has served as a television commentator for several network news programs, has worked both as a correspondent and consultant for a number of PBS Frontline documentaries and was the correspondent for an Emmy award-winning “60 Minutes” segment.
Schell is also the recipient of many prizes and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Overseas Press Club Award, and the Harvard-Stanford Shorenstein Prize in Asian Journalism.
Contact Schell at commlead@usc.edu.