Parisa Khosravi: Senior Vice President and Managing Editor, International Newsgathering, CNN

Parisa Khosravi started at CNN in 1987. After completing seven experience-rich internships during her Columbia College education in Chicago, Parisa received a bachelor's degree in journalism and immediately secured a job as a CNN Video Journalist (VJ). Fourteen years later she has an executive office.
From VJ, Parisa was promoted to Playback, where VJs cued and loaded tape directly for air. She loved having to think ahead of directors. She then was offered a position as an assistant assignment editor at the International Desk, where she gathered news from around the world and provided it to all CNN news entities. "I took pride in elementary work like fonting," she says, "the process of formatting scripts for a teleprompter." Within a year she became a full-fledged Assignment Editor, talking to reporters in the field and deciding what to cover. In her continued rapid ascent, Parisa was eventually promoted to Senior Editor, then Director of Coverage, Vice President and finally -- at least for now -- Senior Vice President and Managing Editor.
On occasion, Parisa performs field duties. In 1995, she secured an exclusive interview with Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Two years later, she produced CNN's live coverage of the 1997 Iranian elections from Tehran. Parisa has received many awards including a 1993 Golden CableACE for CNN's coverage of the Gulf War; a 1992 Peabody Award for CNN's coverage of the attempted coup d'état in the former Soviet Union. Shes also won awards for covering Somalia, Bosnia, the Moscow Uprising of 1994 and the 1996 crisis in Zaire and Rwanda.