Natasha Chen is a CNN correspondent based in the network’s Los Angeles bureau.

Chen has covered stories ranging from the Monterey Park mass shooting, to major entertainment and health care worker strikes, to developments in the theme park industry. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she traveled throughout the Southeast, covering different states’ masking, vaccine distribution, and reopening strategies, along with experiences of business owners, tenants and landlords, immigrants, educators and parents. Other headlines include the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings and the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. In 2019, she spent time at the U.S.-Mexico border, covering families separated by the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy.

Chen was previously a correspondent for CNN Newsource, reporting for about 1,000 global affiliates on developments in Congress, mass shootings, hurricanes and wildfires. She also created original content for affiliates, about the cross section of technology and public safety, and the perspective of a North Korean refugee on the eve of President Trump’s first visit with Kim Jong-Un.

Her journalism career began as a reporter and weekend anchor for KXXV in Killeen, Texas covering breaking news, such as the 2009 mass shooting in Fort Hood. She then moved to WREG in Memphis and later KIRO 7 News in Seattle, covering education, income inequality and housing affordability.

Chen received recognition for her reporting on a fatal Ride the Ducks crash she witnessed, sharing the 2015 Northwest Emmy Award for team coverage. She speaks fluent Mandarin and is a proud member of the Asian American Journalists Association.

A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Chen graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University with a degree in psychology and received a M.A in broadcast journalism from the University of Southern California.