Who Is Sumi Somaskanda? BBC Chief Presenter, Career and Background

She anchored Deutsche Welle for 13 years in Berlin. The reporting she produced alongside it — from Brandenburg coal fields to the Munich Security Conference — is what her career is actually about.

On a mild spring evening, Frauke Hildebrandt drove through choked highways and down county roads, heading deeper into the coal country of Brandenburg, eastern Germany. She was making a case: that West German companies should be legally required to hire from the east, a formal mechanism to address an economic wound that had been open since reunification and that politicians in Berlin kept insisting was closing.

Sumi Somaskanda was there, reporting it for The Atlantic.

The piece that came from that drive was not really about Frauke Hildebrandt. It was about what happens to people, and then to their politics, when the country that absorbed them thirty years earlier never quite followed through on what absorption was supposed to mean. That question, reported on the ground in Brandenburg, turned out to be the thread running through Somaskanda’s entire career. She would eventually follow it across the Atlantic.

Who Is Sumi Somaskanda?

Sumi Somaskanda is a BBC News chief presenter based in Washington DC, where she has anchored the channel’s international coverage since March 2023. Before the BBC, she spent 13 years in Berlin as a senior presenter and correspondent at Deutsche Welle, Germany’s public international broadcaster. She is American, raised in Rochester, New York, and of Sri Lankan Tamil descent. She speaks fluent German and Spanish alongside her native English, and conversational Tamil.

Her publication credits span The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, New Statesman, Newsweek, Al Jazeera, and USA Today. She edited the Berlin Policy Journal, which is published by the German Council on Foreign Relations, and hosted Studio Berlin, a current affairs podcast on KCRW Berlin.

Rochester, Northwestern, and the Fellowship That Took Her to Germany

Somaskanda grew up in Western New York and completed both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Northwestern University. After graduating, she worked at local and regional television stations and a 24-hour news channel in the United States.

Around 2009, she applied for the Robert Bosch Foundation Fellowship, a competitive programme that selected roughly 15 to 20 American professionals each year and placed them inside German institutions for up to a year. The fellowship was specifically designed to strengthen transatlantic ties, and it placed journalism fellows at organisations including Deutsche Welle. It was the bridge that brought her from American local television to Berlin.

She joined DW in early 2010.

Thirteen Years at Deutsche Welle

At Deutsche Welle, Somaskanda anchored “The Journal,” the broadcaster’s flagship global news bulletin, and worked as a senior correspondent covering European affairs. Across 13 years in Berlin, her broadcast work covered:

• The Russian invasion of Ukraine
• Multiple German federal elections and the rise of the AfD as a parliamentary force
• US presidential elections, reported from a European vantage point
• Brexit and its fallout across Germany and the EU
• Immigration and the migration debates that reshaped German politics through the 2010s

That was the broadcast career. Running alongside it, largely out of view of DW’s international television audience, was a sustained body of print and editorial journalism.

Between 2017 and 2020, while anchoring DW each evening, Somaskanda was also:

• Filing for The Atlantic from Brandenburg and eastern Germany on post-reunification economic inequality and political grievance
• Writing for the New Statesman on the AfD’s surge in Saxony and the long shadow of the Treuhand’s privatisation programme after the Berlin Wall fell
• Covering the Munich Security Conference live for the Berlin Policy Journal across three consecutive days in February 2018
• Hosting Studio Berlin on KCRW Berlin, a public radio current affairs podcast examining German democracy, identity, and political change
• Editing the Berlin Policy Journal, a foreign affairs magazine published by the German Council on Foreign Relations

She was also reporting for the Religion News Service from Cottbus, Germany, on the conversion of a church into what was described as the first synagogue in the State of Brandenburg since 1938, and filing for Al Jazeera English from Tempelhof Field in Berlin.

The Reporting Most People Missed

Those parallel assignments were not scattered freelancing. Looking at the dates and subjects across five years, a clear focus runs through them: the post-reunification crisis in eastern Germany and what it produced politically.

She drove to the places other correspondents described from press galleries. She reported from Saxony during elections. She filed three consecutive days of live analysis from inside the Munich Security Conference. Her confirmed byline at the Berlin Policy Journal stretches from September 2017 through December 2018, covering the AfD’s entry into parliament, the MSC, Brexit, and AI governance debates in Germany.

Beyond her written work, Somaskanda moderated the Nobel Prize Summit in 2023, the Progressive Governance Summit in 2021, and has been a speaker at WAN-IFRA, the global organisation that represents the press industry worldwide.

Joining BBC News

In March 2023, Somaskanda was appointed as a chief presenter at BBC News, based in the BBC’s Washington DC studio. She was one of four significant hires the BBC made to expand its North American prime-time operation, alongside Adam Levy from CNN and Helena Humphrey from Euronews.

Paul Royall, Acting Executive Editor of BBC News, said at the time: “Sumi is a real journalistic talent whose international news experience, dynamic presentation skills and approachable style make her ideal for the role.”

In Washington, she has reported on US immigration policy along the Mexico border, covered Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025, and interviewed NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on China’s economic support for Russia. She is a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellowship alumna and a member of the BMW Foundation Responsible Leaders Network.

Brandenburg to the Potomac

For the better part of a decade in Berlin, Somaskanda reported on a specific political problem: what happens when a government fails to address the economic grievances of a region it absorbed, when communities feel economically left behind, when mainstream politics stops responding, and when a far-right party fills the space that creates.

She reported it from Saxony. From Brandenburg coal fields. From cities that reunification promised to rebuild and that, in the view of many people who lived in them, it largely forgot.

She is now stationed in Washington DC. The mechanisms she documented in eastern Germany across those years — economic abandonment, political disillusionment, far-right capture of a grievance that mainstream parties refused to address — are the mechanisms now at the centre of American political life, being debated at a scale Germany never approached.

She followed the story across the Atlantic.

Sumi Somaskanda: At a Glance

Frauke Hildebrandt was still in Brandenburg when Somaskanda left for Washington. The coal fields are still there. So is the story.