Terrell Jermaine Starr is an American travel journalist, foreign correspondent, scholar, and public speaker whose work explores what happens when we move beyond borders, headlines, and assumptions to discover the people behind them. For more than two decades, Starr has traveled across Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Western Europe, and beyond, using journalism and storytelling to help audiences find the commonality in our shared humanity.

A journalist by training, Starr believes travel is one of the most powerful ways to understand the world—and one another. His work challenges audiences to look beyond headlines that can reduce entire countries and communities to war, political conflict, poverty, or crisis. Instead, he takes audiences into the lives of ordinary people, revealing the complexity, humor, resilience, generosity, and humanity that news coverage often leaves out.

Starr’s philosophy is rooted in a simple idea: the more we travel the world, the less we should fear it. Whether exploring lesser-visited countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia or reporting from places facing extraordinary challenges, he uses travel to cultivate curiosity and challenge assumptions. His experiences have taught him that sometimes we have to go where we are uncomfortable, engage with people we assume won’t understand us, and move beyond what we think we know to discover what connects us.

That philosophy has shaped Starr’s work in Ukraine, where he has reported extensively since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. His reporting focuses not only on the war itself, but on the people living through it—their communities, culture, resilience, and everyday lives. His work has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, and other major media outlets, introducing audiences around the world to Ukraine through a deeply human lens.

Starr’s relationship with Eastern Europe began long before the current war. As a Peace Corps volunteer in Georgia from 2003 to 2005, he experienced the Rose Revolution firsthand. He returned to Georgia in 2008 as a Georgian-language student in Tbilisi when Russia invaded the country. From 2009 to 2010, he lived in Ukraine as a Fulbright Program fellow and freelance journalist, producing a photojournalism project documenting the lives of Black Ukrainians.

His journalism career also includes extensive political reporting in the United States. Starr served as FUSION’s national political correspondent during the 2016 presidential campaign and as The Root’s national political correspondent from 2017 to 2021, covering the 2018 midterms and 2020 presidential election. He interviewed political figures including Kamala Harris, Stacey Abrams, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. Earlier in his career, he was a senior reporter for Foxtrot Alpha, covering military technology and policy, and has contributed to Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, Outrider Foundation, and O, The Oprah Magazine.

But Starr’s work has always been about more than politics. He uses journalism and travel to connect people. His reporting asks audiences to look beyond the assumptions that separate us and search for the experiences that unite us. Whether discussing race in America, democracy, Ukraine, Eastern Europe, or his experiences as a Black American traveling through the world, Starr’s goal is to make international stories personal and remind audiences that people who seem different from us often want many of the same things we do.

That perspective also informs Starr’s work as a speaker. He has spoken at dozens of universities across the United States and uses stories from his travels to explore curiosity, courage, resilience, cultural understanding, and the importance of stepping beyond the familiar. His talks challenge audiences to travel beyond fear, question what they think they know, and look beyond the headlines to discover who people really are.

Starr is also a serious scholar whose academic work complements his journalism. He holds a master’s degree in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where his research focused on the European Union’s integration of former communist states, as well as a second master’s degree in Journalism. He earned his bachelor’s degree in English from Philander Smith College.

His academic work continues alongside his journalism and speaking. Starr has been awarded a Fulbright Specialist grant to conduct research on cross-cultural issues in Eastern Europe, extending his longstanding commitment to understanding how people from different cultures see and understand one another.

In November, Starr will be in Lviv, Ukraine, as an INDEX: Institute for Documentation and Exchange fellow, where he will lead a lecture series examining Black American and Ukrainian solidarity. The series brings together his experiences as a Black American journalist, his scholarship on Eastern Europe, and his years of reporting and living in Ukraine to explore connections between two communities whose histories and struggles are often discussed separately.

Starr also teaches at Grinnell College, bringing his experiences as a journalist, scholar, and traveler into the classroom.

Whether he is reporting from a war zone, traveling through an unfamiliar country, teaching students, conducting research, or speaking to a corporate or university audience, Starr’s mission remains the same: to inspire people to be more curious about the world and more open to one another.

He inspires audiences to travel beyond their fears, live beyond the headlines, challenge their assumptions, embrace the unfamiliar, and discover the common humanity that connects us all.