Ellen Nakashima Age, Wikipedia Bio, Husband, Education, Parents Birthplace

Name Ellen Nakashima

Birthday / Ellen Nakashima Age / Date of Birth / DOB As of 2025, she seems to be in her late fifties.

Wedding & Marriage / Husband / Engaged / Spouse / Partner Married to Alan Sipress, a former Middle East correspondent. The couple, who first met in 1995, now has one daughter.

Wiki Biography / Profile Background

Introduction :

Ellen Nakashima is a Japanese-American writer. With a knack for piecing together complex evidence and the intelligence to know where to find it, Nakashima has authored a book & also writes for the Washington Post as a national security reporter.

Family :

In 1910, Ellen’s grandfather Mokuta Nakashima had come to Hawaii from Tamana-gun, a farming region on Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island. A young woman named Sueka Hirano, who was introduced to Mokuta in a trans-pacific photo exchange, agreed to leave Tamana-gun and head to the US to marry Mokuta.
Though Hawaii was an American territory, the law at the time prevented Mokuta and Sueka from becoming citizens.
Sueka and Mokuta went on to have seven sons, one of whom was Ellen’s dad. The sons (who held both Japanese and American citizenship) helped their parents in their family’s fruits and vegetable garden.
During the bombings at Pearl Harbor, Ellen’s father Shigemitsu Nakashima (nickname Shig) was a sophomore student at the University of Hawaii, where he was studying to be a teacher. Shig registered for the National Guard Armory to help the U.S. war cause, but the commanders confiscated the guns of all Japanese-American soldiers, as they couldn’t be trusted.

Education : Qualifications, High School & College Info

Before becoming the prolific writer that she is now, Ellen Nakashima attended The University of California, Berkeley.
Berkley is often recognized as the top public university in the United States, and continues to accept some of the nation’s smartest students. Nakashima was no exception.
She enrolled in Berkley in 1981 to study the humanities. In 1984, she graduated with her Bachelor’s degree.

Work as a Reporter :

After graduation, Elle began to put her humanities studies to work, and took a job as a reporter for The Hartford Courant and the Quincy Patriot Ledger. There, she wrote about social issues and began to get involved in politics.
In June 1995, Nakashima began writing for the Washington Post. At first, she served as a Southeast Asia correspondent for the paper & wrote about foreign issues and how they related to the US. She wrote primarily about security issues, the regimes in the area, and, in some cases, the wrongdoings of US companies.
Among other large headlines, she broke sex trafficking, smuggling, and immigration stories.
In 2014, Ellen was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service. The team had reported on widespread federal government surveillance programs and policy changes, after the leaks by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
In 2016, Ellen tackled stories surrounding former President Donald Trump and his ties with Russia, particularly with reference to the 2016 Presidential election. She reported on issues within the CIA, as well as other United States organizations.

Books Written and Net Worth :

Following her work as a correspondent, Nakashima followed and reported on former Presidential candidate, Al Gore. As he began to move toward a Presidential campaign, she teamed up with fellow writer David Maraniss to write The Prince of Tennessee: The Rise of Al Gore.
David Maraniss, author of other notable biographies, including Bill Clinton’s First in His Class, chose Nakashima to work with due to her close ties to his campaign and her research abilities.
The two of them interviewed hundreds of people to get a portrait of a possible presidential candidate & did not shy away from highlighting some controversial points in his life. They interviewed Al Gore’s mother, Miss Pauline, and traveled old country roads in Carthage with Al’s high-school friend Steve Armistead.
Reviews of the book were fairly consistent and gave high praise to the accuracy and the amount of research that went into the book. To many, however, it felt like “propaganda” reading, as if the only purpose was to get the reader excited about Al Gore’s potential as president.
After working on her book, Nakashima continued work with the Washington Post, but began writing about national security issues. She now writes about civil liberties, new intelligence-gathering technology and techniques, and other things that might affect national security.

Interesting Facts, Height and Trivia :

She was named as 2017 Alumna of the Year by the Daily Californian Education Foundation.
Despite not being very active on social media, Nakashima has over 35,000 followers on Twitter (now called X).
She has also appeared as a commentator on many news outlets, including MSNBC and C-SPAN.
Along with some of her colleagues, she is a recipient of Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.