Elise Hu


Elise Hu is an American broadcast journalist who reports for NPR's on-air and online platforms. She is an international correspondent for NPR; as of August 2017, she is serving as the network's first Seoul, South Korea, bureau chief.

History

Hu was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to Chinese-American immigrants, and grew up in suburban Missouri and Texas. She graduated from Plano Senior High School in Plano, Texas. During high school, she and friends were paid $100 each to appear in national 7-Up advertisements, after which agents scouted Hu to work as a model for a few years into college. She interned at WFAA-TV in Dallas before earning a bachelors in broadcast journalism from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. She speaks Mandarin Chinese.

Career

Hu joined NPR in 2011 and opened the South Korea/Japan bureau in early 2015. She hosts a video series on NPR called "Elise Tries." Previously, she was a founding journalist at the digital news startup, the Texas Tribune and television reporter for KVUE-TV and WYFF-TV, among other stations.
Her reporting has been honored with a National Edward R. Murrow Award for Video, a Gannett Foundation Award for Innovation in Watchdog Journalism, beat reporting awards from the Texas Associated Press and the Austin Chronicle twice named her "Best of Austin" for reporting and social media work.
Hu is also a guest co-anchor on Tech News Today on TWIT, an adjunct instructor for Georgetown University and an adviser and blogger for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
On August 1, 2018, NPR announced that Hu will be leaving their bureau in Seoul to work at NPR West and Anthony Kuhn would become NPR's Seoul correspondent.