Ian Urbina

Education and early career

Before joining The New York Times in 2003, Urbina was in a doctoral program in history and anthropology at the University of Chicago, where he specialized on Cuba. As a Fulbright scholar he did his doctoral dissertation research in Havana.

During those years, he wrote freelance for The International Herald Tribune, Harper's, The Los Angeles Times and The Christian Science Monitor. He is a regular contributor to NPR. and CSPAN.

The New York Times

Urbina was initially a reporter on the Times' Metro desk. In 2005, Urbina moved to the Times' national desk to become its Mid-Atlantic Bureau chief, where he covered West Virginia coal mining disasters, the Gulf oil spill, the Virginia Tech shootings and numerous other breaking stories. He has also written extensively on criminal justice issues, including stories about the use of prisoners for pharmaceutical experiments, immigrant detainees working as unpaid workers, solitary confinement in immigration detention facilities, and the dependence of the U.S. Defense Department on prison labor. He became a senior investigative reporter for the National Desk in 2010, where he wrote a series in 2011, Drilling Down, about the oil and gas industry and fracking.

On worker safety, in 2013, he wrote a story about longterm exposure to hazardous chemicals and the federal agency, O.S.H.A., which is responsible for protecting against these workplace threats. For the New York Times Magazine, he wrote in 2014 a piece called "The Secret Life of Passwords", about the anecdotes and emotions hidden in everyday web-user's "secure" passwords.

In 2015, Urbina wrote a series called "The Outlaw Ocean", about lawlessness on the high seas. To report the stories, Urbina traveled through Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, much of that time spent on fishing ships, chronicling a diversity of crimes offshore, including the killing of stowaways, sea slavery, intentional dumping, illegal fishing, the stealing of ships, gun running, stranding of crews, and murder with impunity.

Films/Creative

Several of Urbina's investigative pieces have been adapted to film. In interviews, Matt Damon and John Kransinski have said that the idea for their 2012 film Promised Land came partly from the Times investigative series, Drilling Down.

A 2007 Times investigation by Urbina about so-called "mag crews"—traveling groups of teenagers, many of them runaways or from broken homes, who sell magazine subscriptions—was optioned for a 2016 movie, American Honey, directed by Andrea Arnold and starring Shia LaBeouf.

In 2010, Urbina wrote a profile for Vanity Fair magazine on Sam Childers, a former Hells Angels's biker and gun runner, turned born-again Christian preacher, who joined the guerrilla fighters in South Sudan. Urbina traveled with Childers, after he was ostensibly hired to kill a brutal warlord named Joseph Kony, leader of a group called the Lord's Resistance Army. In 2011, Childers' life story became the basis of a movie called "Machine Gun Preacher", starring Gerard Butler. Also, in 2011, Urbina's reporting was part of a story optioned for the film Deepwater Horizon with Mark Wahlberg.

In 2015, Leonardo DiCaprio, Netflix and Misher Films bought the movie rights for The Outlaw Ocean series in The New York Times written by Urbina. They intend to make a feature film. They also bought the movie rights for the book by the same name being written by Urbina and to be published by Alfred A. Knopf.

Awards

Personal life

Urbina currently lives in the Washington DC area with his family. As a student at St Albans and at Georgetown Urbina was an accomplished long-distance runner. He has a degree in history from Georgetown University, and a degree in anthropology and history from the University of Chicago. His father is Judge Ricardo M. Urbina, who was also a collegiate runner and the first Latino on the federal bench in DC.