Karmah Elmusa is a Palestinian-American writer and media professional for the Institute for Middle East Understandng. She is based in Washington, DC, where she was born and has lived all of her life, excluding brief stints abroad and five years in San Francisco.

Karmah always wanted to write, but didn’t find her passion for media until after college. She graduated from Georgetown in 2006, and landed her first journalism job as a desk assistant at the national TV show, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Since then, she has held positions at The Washington Post Express, Mother Jones and California Lawyer magazine, and earned her master’s in journalism from University of California-Berkeley. She currently works for a nonprofit that amplifies the Palestinian voice in American media outlets, and recently wrote a piece for Elle.com about her experience as a Palestinian-American.