Jessica Bateman is an award-winning investigative reporter, narrative feature writer and audio documentary maker based in Berlin, Germany. Her longform work explores issues of gender, extremism, faith and belief systems around the world and she's been published in The Guardian, the BBC, The Economist 1843, The Washington Post, Wired, POLITICO Magazine, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, The Nation and many more. She also currently covers Germany for Hyphen Online, a new publication focused on issues important to Muslims around Europe, and teaches International Journalism at the Council on International Education Exchange, Berlin.

In May 2025 she won the European Press Prize Distinguished Reporting Award for her POLITICO Magazine feature about the lasting trauma of Greece's post-civil war black market baby trade and the role Western foreign policy played in this. Other recent projects include a feature about LGBTQ faith communities in the US south, which appeared on the cover of The Washington Post's style section, and a multi-country investigation into how anti-abortion activists export their tactics overseas for The New Republic.

Previously, she was part of the award-winning team that made the BBC World Service investigative series The Anti-Vax Files and The Denial Files. She has also worked as a foreign correspondent in Greece, Germany and the Balkans, covering everything from immigration and overtourism to archeological discoveries, and in 2020 she was lead editor on European collaborative journalism project Summer of Solidarity, commissioning and editing feature stories from around the continent. She has discussed her reporting on BBC World News, BBC Radio 4’s World at One, James O’Brien on LBC, and on Slate’s Outward podcast.

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