Zain Asher is an anchor for CNN International based in New York. She anchors One World with Zain Asher and Bianna Golodryga weekdays at 12pm ET on CNN International and CNN Max, a new seven-day-a-week/24-hour service on Max, Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming platform.

She is the author of ‘Where the Children Take Us: How One Family Achieved the Unimaginable’ (Amistad), a memoir that tells the story of her mother’s harrowing fight to raise four children as a widowed immigrant in South London.

Asher also hosts Marketplace Africa, CNN International’s weekly business show about the continent and its place within global markets, and often interviews CEOs and world leaders for the program.

Asher has anchored major breaking news and business stories for CNN including the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the ongoing war in Ukraine, the Covid-19 pandemic, the US-China trade war, the August 2020 explosion in Beirut, anti-police violence protests in Nigeria, racial and economic inequality in America, the deaths of both Fidel Castro and boxing legend Muhammad Ali and the 2013 terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon.

In 2014 Asher was a part of a CNN team sent to Nigeria to report on the kidnapping of hundreds of schoolgirls by Boko Haram militants in Chibok, Nigeria. CNN’s coverage of the horrific abduction was recognized with a prestigious 2014 Peabody Award.

Asher previously served as a CNN business correspondent covering the stock market from the New York Stock Exchange, U.S. Federal Reserve monetary policy and high-profile IPOs.

Asher joined CNN from MONEY magazine where she covered careers and investing. Prior to MONEY, Asher was a general assignment reporter for News 12 in the greater New York area.

Born and raised in London, Asher graduated from Oxford University where she studied French and Spanish and graduated with a distinction in oral Spanish. In 2006, she earned an MS from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

She is fluent in French, Spanish and Igbo (her native Nigerian dialect).