Ian James Lee

Lee began working for CNN after a church bombing in Alexandria, Egypt, on New Year’s Eve 2010. One of Lee’s Tweets during the January 25 Revolution is cited in the book A Twitter Year: 365 Days in 140 Characters by Kate Bussmann. Lee's Tweets are also preserved in an archived collection maintained by the American University in Cairo's Rare Books and Special Collections Library as part of the blogs, Twitter feeds, local and regional media coverage, and other sites related to the January 25th Revolution. Lee is also quoted in News Now: Visual Storytelling in the Digital Age by Susan Green, Mark Lodato, B. William Silcock, and Carol Schwalbe.

Lee was on board the Royal Caribbean Oasis of the Seas in the Atlantic Ocean to cover the solar eclipse of August 21, 2017. He was on Anderson Cooper 360° while experiencing totality on the cruise liner.

Lee married Holly Dagres on July 1, 2016, in a private ceremony on a ranch in Wyoming. The couple met in Cairo, Egypt.

During the 2013-15 detention of Al-Jazeera journalists by Egypt, CNN’s Lee reported several times on the Al Jazeera English news channel in a show of solidarity with the imprisoned journalists. Lee's coverage of the Al Jazeera trial is documented in the book, The Marriott Cell: An Epic Journey from Cairo's Scorpion Prison to Freedom by Mohamed Fahmy.

While covering the Libyan Revolution of 2011, Lee was injured in Sirte by a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) that exploded next to him. It killed an ambulance driver and sent shrapnel into his leg.

Ian Lee (Ian James Lee) is an American journalist based in Britain for CBS News. Prior to working for CBS, he worked for CNN, and, before that, Lee was also the multimedia editor at the Daily News Egypt from 2009 to 2011. During that time, he also was a freelance video journalist for Time Magazine and spent a year as a package producer for Reuters. Lee has covered the 2011 Arab Spring, Ukraine Crisis, Sochi Winter Olympics, 2013 Egyptian coup d'état in Egypt, 2014 Gaza War, 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt, and 2017 North Korea crisis, among other things.

Lee was born in Lander, Wyoming, USA. Lee graduated in 2003 with honors from Lander Valley High School with his best friend Royal Tophia. Lee then went on and graduated in 2007 from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University with a bachelor's degree in journalism. He also received certificates in Arabic and Islamic Studies from ASU. He was also awarded to the Carnegie Knight Middle East Journalism Scholarship. In 2008, Lee received a Fulbright scholarship to Egypt.