Pathbreakers of Arab America—Vivian Salama

posted on: Mar 4, 2026

By: John Mason / Arab America Contributing Writer

This is the one-hundred and twelfth in Arab America’s series on American pathbreakers of Arab descent. The series features personalities from various fields, including entertainment, business, sports, science, the arts, academia, journalism, and politics. Our 112th pathbreaker is Vivian Salama, a prominent figure in journalism, renowned for her roles as a reporter, producer, editor, and correspondent. She has covered U.S. foreign policy and national security for more than two decades and is defined by some as “brilliant, energetic, and experienced.”

Popular in her career as a reporter, Vivian Salama’s work is defined by courage, originality, and versatility

Vivian Salama was born in 1980 in Rockland County, a suburb of New York City. She was born to Egyptian immigrant parents, Fayez Abdel Messih Marcos and Charlotte Georges Farag. Vivian has three siblings—Venise Fayez, Rosette Attia, and Ragui Marcos. Her parents promoted a rich cultural background for their children. Her parents, along with her siblings, supported her youthful passion for news reporting.

Highly determined in her pursuit of higher education, Vivian earned a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from Rutgers University, followed by a master’s degree in Islamic politics from Columbia University. Her academic journey continued at Georgetown University Law Center, where she obtained her Doctor of Law (J.D.) in International Law in 2019. Much of Vivian’s earlier career was spent overseas as a foreign correspondent. Vivian has broadly covered foreign policy and national security for more than two decades, reporting from more than 85 countries. She is also an attorney and a member of the District of Columbia Bar.

Vivian is married to Joe Salama, also of Egyptian descent, described as an American working most recently as a Global Head of Anti-Financial Crimes and AMLO at Deutsche Bank. Having purportedly met during their junior year at Rutgers, they married not long afterwards. They have two sons, Michael and George, the latter of whom is married.

According to one of our sources, “Vivian’s dreams came true as soon as she graduated from college in 1999, as she began working for WNBC Channel 4.” There, she was part of the team for four years, serving as the producer. She then freelanced for two years, mostly contributing to publications such as ‘Jerusalem Post,’ ‘Newsweek Magazine,’ and the ‘Voice of America’ newsletter. Along the way, Vivian even found time to co-author the ‘Radicalization, Terrorism and Conflict,’ a book released in 2013 by the Cambridge Scholars Publishing. She also published her own children’s book, titled ‘The Long Journey Home’ in 2019 – a story about a young refugee boy who flees Syria with his parents, in search of a better life.

Salama continued her overseas interests, including assignments in Pakistan for ‘TIME.com’ and ‘France24.’ For those, she learned the Urdu language “to be able to survive there.” After serving her alma mater, Rutgers, as an adjunct lecturer in 2007, Vivian moved to live in Abu Dhabi, where she worked for Bloomberg TV and became the Head of the Abu Dhabi Bureau in 2009. Following three years reporting for Bloomberg, Vivian returned to freelancing and travelling around North Africa to report from there.

As a freelancer, Salama reported on the elections for president of Egypt and the attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. Reportedly being “a big fan of languages, and although life and career demanded that she learn several languages, she has since fallen in love with learning them.” So, besides Urdu and Spanish, Vivian speaks Arabic fluently, having spent time perfecting what she had already learned growing up with her Egyptian immigrant parents, in the Arabic studies program at the American University in Cairo.

As Salama’s reporting skills and reputation grew, she became more recognized in the journalism field. Thus, she was invited in June 2014 to serve as the Iraq Bureau Chief by the Associated Press (AP), in charge of her own team of reporters and journalists, covering some of the most important topics in and around Iraq. Moving back to Washington, D.C. in 2015, Vivian continued with AP as deputy political editor. As one source reported, “She was steadily climbing the ladder, as she was promoted to the national security foreign policy reporter in September 2016, and then in January 2017 to a White House reporter.”

From the AP and some other short-term work, Vivian began work with ‘The Wall Street Journal.’ Her reporting for ‘The Journal “has taken her across America to cover presidential campaigns, into the Oval Office to question the commander in chief, and through passport checks in more than 85 countries. In covering the White House, Salama spent a year on the campaign trail during the 2024 presidential election and, more recently, covered national security issues for ‘The Journal,’ with much of her focus on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Vivian’s greatest passion is travelling, and her job as a reporter has made it possible for her to travel around the world and report on some of the most important events

Salama’s love of travel, combined with her expertise in reporting, has allowed her to chronicle war from the front lines, as already mentioned, to run the AP’s Baghdad bureau, and to travel widely across the Middle East during the Arab Spring. “Her doggedness has repeatedly resulted in ground-shaking scoops, including President Trump’s awkward first call with Mexico’s president in 2017—in which he threatened to send U.S. troops after the ‘bad hombres.’” In 2019, she was the first to reveal his interest in buying Greenland.

In Vivian’s Persian Gulf work, based in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, she reported on the impact of the global financial crisis on the Middle East’s financial hub and on the Obama administration’s efforts to bring Iran to the negotiating table over its nuclear program. Her fluency in Arabic has been a clear advantage in her landing so many important stories from the Arab World and the Persian Gulf.

In August 2025, ‘The Atlantic Magazine’ hired Salama as a staff writer as part of a dramatic expansion of reporting at the intersection of national defense, technology, and global conflict. She joined ‘The Atlantic’ from ‘The Wall Street Journal,’ as the editor of ‘The Atlantic’ noted, “We’re happy to share the good news that Vivian Salama is joining [us]–Vivian is a brilliant, energetic, and experienced reporter who has covered U.S. foreign policy and national security for more than two decades.

We look forward to reading more of Vivian’s reporting and analysis of news from around the world, and to watching her as a subject-matter expert on various cable networks.

Sources:
-“Vivian Salama Wiki Biography,” BiographyMedia, 4/9/2024
-“Who is Vivian Salama? Everything You Need to Know,” BOL News, Web Desk, 9/3/2024
-“Vivian Salama-Biography and Wiki,” Wiki-en, 4/20/2023
-“’The Atlantic’ Hires Vivian Salama as Staff Writer,” The Atlantic, 7/8/2025

John Mason, Ph.D., focuses on Arab culture, society, and history and is the author of LEFT-HANDED IN AN ISLAMIC WORLD: An Anthropologist’s Journey into the Middle East, New Academia Publishing, 2017 and of his new novel, WHISPERS FROM THE DESERT: Zaki, a Little Genie’s Tales of Good and Evil (2025), under his pen name, Yahia Al-Banna. He has taught at the University of Libya in Benghazi, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, and the American University in Cairo. John served with the United Nations in Tripoli, Libya, and consulted extensively on socioeconomic and political development for USAID and the World Bank in 65 countries.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab America. The reproduction of this article is permissible with proper credit to Arab America and the author.

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