The Washington Post
Ian Shapira joined The Washington Post in 2000 as a reporting intern in the Style section. In 2024, he joined the Post’s Investigative unit as a member of its new narrative accountability team. His articles on the Virginia Tech and Navy Yard shootings were included in the Post’s entries that won the Pulitzer Prize and that were named as a finalist in the breaking news category. His stories chronicling systemic racism, sexism, sexual assault and waterboarding at the Virginia Military Institute won a George Polk award, the Fred M. Hechinger Grand Prize for Distinguished Education Reporting, and the Paul Tobenkin Memorial Award from Columbia University for reporting on racial or religious hatred, intolerance or discrimination. The articles prompted an independent investigation into VMI ordered by the governor, the resignation of the college’s longtime superintendent, the appointment of VMI’s first Black leader, and the removal of the campus’s 108-year-old statue of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson. In 2012, his discovery of archival documents about a Renoir painting up for auction led to its seizure by the FBI and the revelation it had been stolen decades earlier from the Baltimore Museum of Art. He has also written numerous stories exploring the lives and deaths of CIA operatives, especially those who perished in the war in Afghanistan. Shapira is a native of Louisville, Kentucky. He now lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife and two daughters.
