Alex Wagner

Alexandra Swe Wagner was born on November 27, 1977, in Washington, D.C. Her mother, Tin Swe Thant, an immigrant from Yangon, Myanmar, became a naturalized U.S. citizen. Her father, Carl Wagner, from Lansing, Iowa, was a political consultant who co-chaired Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. Wagner attended Woodrow Wilson High School and graduated from Brown University in 1999 with a degree in art history and literature. She began her career as a cultural correspondent for the Center for American Progress.

From 2003 to 2007, Wagner served as editor-in-chief of The Fader magazine, focusing on music and cultural movements globally. Following this, she was the executive director of Not On Our Watch, an advocacy organization co-founded by notable actors focusing on mass atrocities and human rights. Her work included traveling to regions such as Burma, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. She then transitioned to political journalism, becoming the White House correspondent for Politics Daily, where she covered international and domestic affairs, including the BP oil spill and the Egyptian revolution. She continued her journalistic work at The Huffington Post after its acquisition by AOL.

Wagner joined MSNBC as an analyst in 2010 and later hosted “Now with Alex Wagner” from 2011 to 2015. After leaving MSNBC, she became a senior editor at The Atlantic in 2016 and a TV co-anchor on “CBS This Morning Saturday” from 2016 to 2018. In 2018, she co-hosted “The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth” on Showtime. She returned to MSNBC in 2022 to host “Alex Wagner Tonight” and also hosted the first season of Netflix’s “The Mole” reboot. Her book, “Futureface: A Family Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging,” was published in 2018.