Lisa Ling is currently a special contributor to CBS News. For nine seasons prior, she executive produced and hosted This Is Life on CNN where she embedded with a notorious biker club and explored the medicinal use of psychedelics in psychotherapy. In 2021, she executive produced and hosted Take Out, an exploration of Asian American history through the lens of delicious Asian food that has become so ubiquitous in the U.S. Before moving to CNN, Lisa executive produced and hosted Our America on OWN. She was also a field correspondent for The Oprah Winfrey Show and a contributor to ABC News' Nightline. For these shows, she reported from dozens of countries, covering stories about gang rape in the Congo, bride burning in India and the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, among other issues that are too often ignored. Lisa was the first female host of National Geographic’s flagship show Explorer which sent her to cover the phenomenon of female suicide bombers, the spread of the MS-13 gang — considered the world’s most dangerous gang, and the humanitarian crisis inside North Korea. She got her start in journalism as a correspondent for Channel One News where she covered the civil war in Afghanistan at 21 years of age. She later went on to become a co-host of ABC Daytime's hit show The View, which won its first daytime Emmy during her time at the show. Lisa is the co-author of “Mother, Sister. Daughter, Bride: Rituals of Womanhood,” and “Somewhere Inside: One Sister’s Captivity in North Korea and The Other’s Fight to Bring Her Home” that she penned with her sister Laura. In 2014, President Obama appointed Lisa to the Commission on White House Fellows. She is an advisory board member for The First Partner of California’s CA Partners Project, The Asian American Foundation (TAAF), and a Baby2Baby angel. Lisa is married to Paul Song and has two daughters, Jett and Ray.
