Joanne Kenen
Commonwealth Fund Journalist in Residence, Assistant Lecturer
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Joanne Kenen is the inaugural Commonwealth Fund Journalist in Residence at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she also teaches about the changing political and economic landscape of US media and how it affects public health practitioners. She is a nationally known health journalist, writer, and public speaker.
Kenen is a contributing editor to Politico Magazine, Politico “Nightly” and a regular panelist on Kaiser Health News’ “What the Health” podcast.
Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, she was a writer and editor at Politico for 10 years, spending most of that time overseeing its health coverage from the implementation of the Affordable Care Act to the coronavirus pandemic. She was part of a team of senior editors who oversaw a year-long multimedia magazine series for Politico's “Agenda” on the future of public health in a demographically changing America. She also covered health policy and politics for Reuters on Capitol Hill for more than a decade, as well as two national presidential campaigns. Earlier in her career, she reported from Central America, Miami, and New York.
As a Kaiser Family Foundation fellow in 2006-07, she wrote extensively about aging and end of life. Later, she was the senior writer at the nonpartisan New America Foundation's health program from 2008-10.
Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Slate, Health Affairs, Kaiser Health News, Slate, and numerous other outlets. She is a frequent speaker, moderator, and TV and radio commentator and has guest lectured at universities including Princeton, Columbia, the University of Michigan and Harvard, where she was a leadership fellow at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
