Soledad O'Brien

Her siblings are law professor Maria O'Brien (born 1960), GE corporate lawyer Cecilia Vega (born 1961), businessman Tony O'Brien (born 1962), who heads a documents company, eye surgeon Estela Ogiste (born 1964), and anesthesiologist Orestes O'Brien (born 1967).

Her niece is journalist Antonia Hylton.

María de la Soledad Teresa O'Brien (born September 19, 1966) is an American broadcast journalist and executive producer.

Interracial marriage was illegal in Maryland before 1967, so in 1958 O'Brien's parents married in Washington, D.C., where marriage laws were less restrictive.

The newly wedded O'Briens then moved to Long Island, to the town of St. James.

O'Brien is the fifth of six children, all graduates of Harvard College.

O'Brien graduated from Smithtown High School East in 1984.

She attended Radcliffe College from 1984 to 1988, starting as pre-med and English and American literature, but left to take a job at WBZ-TV.

She also covered such notable stories as John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane crash and the 1990s school shootings in Colorado and Oregon.

She joined NBC News in 1991 and was based in New York as a field producer for the Nightly News and Weekend Today.

She then worked for three years as a local reporter and bureau chief for San Francisco's then-NBC affiliate KRON-TV.

At KRON she was a reporter on "The Know Zone."

Starting in 1996 and during the dot-com boom, O'Brien anchored MSNBC's weekend morning show and the cable network's technology program The Site, which aired weeknights from the spring of 1996 to November 1997.

The show was unique in that she interacted with a virtual character named Dev Null, played by Leo Laporte in a motion-capture suit.

From July 1999 to July 2003, O'Brien was co-anchor of the NBC News program, Weekend Today with David Bloom.

During that time she contributed reports for the weekday Today Show and for weekend editions of NBC Nightly News.

O'Brien went back to school while pregnant with her first child and earned her degree from Harvard in English and American Literature in 2000.

O'Brien started her career in journalism as a medical reporter on WXKS-FM in Boston because of her background as a pre-med student in college.

O'Brien began her career as an associate producer and news writer at WBZ-TV, then the NBC affiliate in Boston.

O'Brien co-anchored CNN's American Morning from 2003 to 2007, and was the anchor of CNN's morning news program Starting Point from 2012 to 2013.

O'Brien moved to CNN, where from July 2003 to April 2007, she was co-anchor of the CNN program, American Morning CNN's flagship morning program that aired live from New York City.

In 2004, at the age of 38, she was named to Crain's New York Business "40 Under 40" list.

In 2005, she covered the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, where she interviewed then head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Michael Brown.

O'Brien anchored a CNN special, Black in America, in July 2007.

She also anchored exit poll coverage during CNN's coverage of the primaries and caucuses in the 2008 United States presidential race, and filled in for Paula Zahn on Paula Zahn Now before Zahn left CNN in 2007.

In 2009, O'Brien completed a documentary titled Latino In America, documenting the lives of Latinos living in America.

She continued working as a reporter for CNN, mainly hosting "In America" documentaries, and occasionally filled in for Anderson Cooper on Anderson Cooper 360.

From January 2012 to March 2013, O'Brien was anchor of the CNN program, Starting Point. After CNN canceled American Morning and replaced it with two new programs, Early Start and Starting Point in 2011, O'Brien began anchoring Starting Point on January 2, 2012.

She is chairwoman of Starfish Media Group, a multiplatform media production company and distributor that she founded in 2013.

She is also a member of the Peabody Awards board of directors, which is presented by the University of Georgia's Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.

In 2013, O'Brien became special correspondent on the Al Jazeera America news program America Tonight, and was also a correspondent on HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel until the show's final episode in December of 2023.

It was announced on February 21, 2013, that O'Brien had reached an agreement with CNN to leave Starting Point for the new Starfish Media Group production company.

CNN would provide funding in return for non-exclusive rights to its documentaries.

March 29, 2013, was her last day on air at CNN as an anchor.

Since 2016, O'Brien has been the host for Matter of Fact with Soledad O'Brien, a nationally syndicated weekly talk show produced by Hearst Television.

O'Brien was born and raised in St. James, New York, on the North Shore of Long Island to Edward Ephrem O'Brien (d. 2019), a mechanical engineering professor at Stony Brook University, and Estela O'Brien (née Marquetti y Mendieta) (d. 2019), a French and English teacher at Smithtown High School West.

Her parents were both immigrants and met while they were students at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Her father is from Toowoomba, Queensland, in Australia and is of three quarters Irish and one quarter Scottish descent.

O'Brien's mother is from Havana, Cuba, and is of Afro-Cuban descent.

When she was 14 years old, she came to the United States, sponsored by Oblate Sisters of Providence of Maryland.