While best known as one
of the country's most well informed and thoughtful observers
on China, Orville Schell has also been a ship-hand, a war correspondent
in Indochina, a rancher, a journalist reporting for such magazines
as The New York Times Magazine, Harpers, The
New Yorker, TIME, Wired, and Foreign Affairs.
He has been a contributor on China for PBS, NBC, and CBS, where
a 60 Minutes program of his won an Emmy. He has also
served as a correspondent for several PBS/Frontline documentaries
on China and Tibet and covered the war in Iraq for The New
York Review of Books.
Until recently, Schell
served as Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley.
While he remains on the UC Berkeley faculty as Professor Emeritus,
he is now Director of the Asia Society's newly established Center
on US-China Relations in New York City. In this capacity, he
leads new programs on the environment, the media and foreign
policy in an effort promote more constructive dialogue between
key Chinese and American leaders. He is also a Fellow at Shorenstein
Center at the John F. Kennedy School, Harvard University.
Schell has served on the
board of Human Rights Watch, Current TV and is a member of the
Council on Foreign Relations. His written work includes some
fifteen books, ten of them about China, including Virtual
Tibet, Mandate
of Heaven and Discos and Democracy, as well
as the five-volume China
Reader. He is currently working on issues of continuing
political and economic reform in China.
His lecture topics include:
“How sustainable is the China boom?”; “What
is the future of Tibet?”; “Is the American media
letting us down?”; and “China: The Environment and
Climate Change.”
Schell has been honored
with fellowships from the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the MacDowell
Colony, the Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation and the Freedom Forum at Columbia University.
He has also received numerous honors, including the Overseas
Press Club of America Award, a Page One Award, and, most recently,
the Shorenstein Journalism Award from Stanford and Harvard Universities
for the best coverage of Asia.
Schell, who also has an
active interest in photography, has also written the opening
essays for such books as Jack Birns’ Assignment Shanghai,
James Whitlow Delano's Empire: Impressions from China,
and Sebastiao Salgado's Sahel: The End of The Road.
Schell is currently working
on a book on Chinese history for The Modern Library at Random
House.
•••
“Mr. Schell’s
blend of graceful analysis and unobtrusive firsthand reporting...
skillfully captures the improbable, even surreal, air of theater
that pervades much of contemporary China.”
— The New York
Times Book Review
“Orville Schell
has for more than 30 years been widely admired for his original
and resourceful journalism, especially his nine books and many
in-depth reports for The New Yorker and other publications about
China.”
