Yasmeen Altaji is a podcast producer based in Abu Dhabi at international English-language publication The National News, where she hosts and produces the outlet’s daily news program, Trending Middle East, and produces multiple programs.

She earned her M.A. in Journalism with a Politics concentration from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism as a recipient of the Gordon and Maggie Gray Fellowship for International Reporting. Prior to that, she earned her B.S. in Journalism and B.Mus. in Voice and Opera from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications and Bienen School of Music, respectively.

Her reporting on US politics, the Israel-Gaza war, Middle Eastern arts and culture and more has appeared in outlets including the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera English, Middle East Eye, Scene Noise, and the CBC. While a student, she was a part-time copy editor at several Axios local channels. She is the founder and editor of The Word, an independent news organization serving the global Assyrian community.

As a student at Columbia University in 2024 and 2025, she was selected to be a member of the Columbia Startup Lab’s Incubate program, where she incorporated and monetized The Word Media. In 2023, Yasmeen’s work on The Word won Best Podcast in the regional division of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Mark of Excellence Awards. In 2022, she was recognized as a finalist in the same category. In the 2022-2023 academic year, she was selected to participate in Northwestern University’s Knight Lab, where she worked with a cohort on research and development of NFT-based subscription models for news outlets.

Yasmeen's reporting has connected her exclusively with stories and sources in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and the Kurdistan Region, and the United States and has manifested in her written articles, audio stories, on-camera reportage and photo essays. She is a native English speaker proficient in Arabic, Assyrian and Spanish.