Brian Padden

Brian Padden is a senior news correspondent in the Voice of America News Center in Washington, D.C. He recently spent four years as the VOA’s Seoul News Bureau Chief, where he primarily covered North Korea’s accelerated nuclear buildup and its diplomatic pivot. He also worked for three years as the Jakarta Bureau Chief for VOA, where he reported on natural disasters, fragile democracies, and Islamic extremism in Southeast Asia.

But for most of his long career with VOA, Brian was based in Washington, D.C., and traveled around the world, often at a moment’s notice, to cover breaking news, such as democracy protests in Hong Kong, conflicts in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine, or important events such as elections in Venezuela or the Olympics in China.

Brian was born and raised in Levittown, Pennsylvania, studied radio/TV/film at Temple University, and in 1980 joined the Peace Corps, where he spent three years working on educational television projects in Paraguay.