Nina Bernstein

Bernstein graduated from Harvard in 1970 with a B.A. in European history and literature. She worked for newspapers in Milwaukee and Iowa, then was a reporter for New York Newsday for 9 years, including time as a foreign correspondent in Berlin and Bosnia. She joined the Times in 1995.

Bernstein was a Nieman fellow at Harvard in 1983–1984, and in 2002-2003 was a journalism fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. She is the author of The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care (Pantheon, 2001), which won the Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism given by the New York Public Library,[6] and a 2002 PEN America First Nonfiction award.[7] It was also a finalist for the National Book Award [8] and the National Book Critics Award.[9] She has contributed lead chapters to two academic books, "Writing Immigration: Scholars and Journalists in Dialogue (University of California Press, 2011),[10] and "Challenging Immigration Detention: Academics, Activists and Policy-Makers (Edward Elgar Publishing 2017).[11] She is also the author of a children's book of fiction, Magic by the Book (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005).

Bernstein is married to Columbia University professor Andreas Huyssen. They have two children. Her father, Lester Bernstein, was a journalist and an editor with The New York Times and Time magazine and served as the editor in chief of Newsweek from 1979 to 1982.