Meet the team

From Washington Katty has covered two presidential elections

Washington Correspondent Katty Kay reports on U.S. news and politics for BBC World News America.

Her career with the BBC began in Zimbabwe in 1990 where she filed radio reports for the Africa Service of BBC World Service radio. Among the stories covered during her time there were Zimbabwean land reform and the issue of white farmers, the independence of Namibia, and the demise of apartheid in South Africa.

Katty then went on to work as a BBC correspondent in London, and later Tokyo, reporting on stories including the Kobe earthquake, the gas attack on the Tokyo underground and the beginning of the Japanese economic recession.

She settled in Washington in 1996 where she took some time out of broadcast journalism to join The Times Washington bureau before returning to the BBC as a freelance journalist in 2002.

From Washington, Katty has covered sex scandals in the Clinton administration, two Presidential elections as well as wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.

She also witnessed first-hand the huge change in American policy and psyche brought on by the attacks of September 11. Katty was at the Pentagon just 20 minutes after a hijacked airplane flew into the building - one of her most vivid journalistic memories is of interviewing soldiers still visibly shaking from the attack.

Katty is a contributor on Meet the Press, Larry King Live, The Chris Matthews Show and a regular guest host for Diane Rehm on NPR.

Katty grew up all over the Middle East, where her father was posted as a British diplomat. She studied modern languages at Oxford and went on to work for a brief period with the Bank of England.

A fluent French and Italian speaker with what she describes as "rusty Japanese", Katty juggles her journalism with raising four children with her husband, a consultant.