Deborah Jian Lee is an award-winning journalist, radio producer and author of the critically-acclaimed book Rescuing Jesus: How People of Color, Women and Queer Christians are Reclaiming Evangelicalism.

Her book reporting has taken her to secret societies of LGBT Christians within conservative enclaves, social justice Christian communes and many other corners of the subculture, where she explores the intersection of evangelical faith with race, gender, sexuality and progressive politics.

She is an editor and reporter at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a journalism nonprofit that supports independent journalists covering economic inequality in America and partners with major national media outlets to help reach the best possible audience. As an editor, she helps shape narrative features as well as reported personal essays about people living on the economic brink in America, and how society might move forward. As a reporter, she has written about employment challenges for people with invisible disabilities, how the pandemic changed female ambition and the psychological and economic harm of the religious exemption to Title IX, which allows Christian colleges to explicitly discriminate against LGBTQ+ students with impunity.

She is also a Religion and Public Life fellow at Harvard Divinity School, where she teaches journalism with the aim of advancing the public understanding of religion through deeply-reported narrative journalism. She previously taught news reporting and magazine writing as a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City and intro to journalism at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY.

Deborah writes about a variety of subjects, including religion, economic inequality, deradicalizing from white power movements, international human rights, health, travel, personal finance and much more. Her stories have been published by Esquire, Fast Company, ELLE, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Playboy, Slate, Religion Dispatches, New York, Reuters, GOOD, SELF, WBEZ and WNYC, and many others. She was previously a staff reporter at The Associated Press.

Her series about migrant workers in China, written with reporting partner Sushma Subramanian, was a finalist for the 2012 Livingston Awards, aka the Pulitzer for the Young. The story, about the 58 million children left behind in China's countryside without their parents due to restrictive national policies, follows one mother's journey from the heart of China's industrial boom back to her village, as she tries to reunite her broken family. The pair also produced a radio documentary which explores the world of China's "bachelor villages," or areas overrun with aging bachelors whose bleak marriage prospects are a direct result of the country's gender imbalance. That documentary won the 2012 Newswomen’s Club of New York Front Page award for radio feature.