Cristina Maza is a journalist, writer, and editor with over a decade of experience writing about foreign policy and global affairs. 

Cristina currently reports on foreign policy and defense for National Journal, with a focus on the U.S. Congress. 

In 2023, with the support of George Mason University, she founded Lazo Magazine, an experimental online publication that explores multiculturalism and crossing borders. She also writes a popular weekly newsletter about international news. You can sign up here. 

In her role at National Journal, Cristina Maza regularly interviews U.S. lawmakers and foreign policy leaders, including Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Chris Murphy. She has interviewed the European High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Kaja Kallas, Spain’s Arancha González Laya, Estonia’s Margus Tsahkana, Ukraine’s Oksana Markarova, Poland’s Radek Sikorski, and Belarus’s Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, among many others. She has also covered NATO summits, the Munich Security Conference, and other international events. 

Over the past several years, Cristina was a Transatlantic Media Fellow with the Heinrich Böll Foundation, where she covered the refugee crisis in Poland following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. She was a participant in the Austrian-American Media Fellowship, where she wrote about Vienna’s history of military neutrality. Cristina traveled to South Korea for the East-West Center’s Korea-United States Journalist Exchange, where she reported on North Korean defectors and popular support for Korean reunification. Additionally, she participated in the RIAS Berlin German-American Journalist Exchange Program, covering the future of the NATO alliance from Brussels and the rise of the far right in Germany. 

Cristina frequently appears on podcasts and radio programs, such as the BBC and Sirius XM’s The Julie Mason Show. 

She enjoys telling personal stories that illustrate broader policy debates. Throughout her career, Cristina has interviewed Cambodian women who were trafficked to China and sold as brides and profiled female activists fighting illegal logging in the Cambodian jungles. In Texas, she reported on efforts to re-settle Afghan refugees after the U.S. military withdrew from their country. Her investigative series into Cambodia's unregulated surrogacy industry won a Society of Publishers in Asia award for editorial excellence. 

Cristina previously covered foreign policy and international affairs for Newsweek Magazine, was the Washington D.C. correspondent for the German news wire Deutsche Presse Agentur, worked as a reporter and editor for the Phnom Penh Post in Cambodia, and was a reporting fellow for the Christian Science Monitor in Washington D.C. She was also a contributing editor for United Explanations, a multi-lingual online publication that covers international affairs. 

As a freelance journalist, her work has appeared in Foreign Policy Magazine, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, The New Republic, Roads & Kingdoms, The Institute for War and Peace Reporting, The Diplomat, VICE, and World Politics Review, among many others. 

A graduate of the University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, Cristina enjoys black coffee, books, and traveling internationally. 

In addition to the United States, she has lived in and reported from Central America, Central Asia, Western Europe, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Southeast Asia, and the United Kingdom. She speaks English, Spanish, and Serbian, and she is continually working to improve her Russian and German language skills. 

Please reach out with story tips, assignments, media requests, or just to have a chat. c.maza@protonmail.com.