Skip to content
The Outlaw Ocean Project

Director and Founder of The Outlaw Ocean Project

Ian Urbina

Ian Urbina

Ian Urbina is the director of The Outlaw Ocean Project, a non-profit journalism organization based in Washington D.C. that produces investigative stories about human rights, environment and labor concerns on the two thirds of the planet covered by water. 

Before founding The Outlaw Ocean Project, Urbina spent roughly 17 years as a staff reporter for The New York Times. He has received various journalism awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, two George Polk Awards and an Emmy. Several of his investigations have also been converted into major motion pictures.

Email Ian

Select publications

More reporting

  1. NBC News

    The Whistleblower

    An American took his dream job in India. What he found was something else entirely.

  2. The New Yorker

    A Fleet Prone to Captive Labor and Plunder

    China has expanded an armada of far-flung fishing vessels. And this has come at a grave human toll.

  3. The New Yorker

    The Uyghurs Forced to Process the World’s Fish

    China forces minorities from Xinjiang to work in industries around the country. As it turns out, this includes processing much of the seafood sent to America and Europe.

  4. The New Yorker

    The North Koreans Behind Global Seafood

    China uses thousands of workers from the Hermit Kingdom, in violation of U.N. sanctions and U.S. law. Many at the plants recounted rampant sexual abuse.

  5. The New Yorker

    Fish Farming is Feeding the Globe. What’s the Cost for Locals?

    In the small coastal African country of Gambia, an exploding industry to produce a lucrative high-protein powder called fishmeal has led to big economic promises, and a steep environmental price. Nearly half of all fish pulled from the sea globally is not used for human consumption but instead is ground up, dried and fed as powder or pellets to livestock, most especially farmed fish. This piece explores the surprising way that fish farming - or aquaculture - which was meant to slow the amount of fish being pulled from the ocean has actually accelerated it.

  6. The New York Times Magazine

    The Secret Life of Passwords

    We despise them – yet we imbue them with our hopes and dreams, our dearest memories, our deepest meanings. Turns out, passwords unlock much more than our accounts. A motivational mantra, a swipe at the boss, a hidden shrine to a lost love, an inside joke with ourselves, a defining emotional scar — many of our most prized passwords are also mental tchotchkes that carry our inner lives forward. Urbina spent 5 years convincing people to tell him their passwords and the rich stories hidden within many of them.

  7. The New York Times

    Using Jailed Migrants as a Pool of Cheap Labor

    This story revealed that the largest employer of undocumented immigrants in America is the U.S. government. As the federal government cracked down on immigrants where were in the country illegally and penalized businesses that hired them, the federal prison system employs tens of thousands of those same undocumented immigrants each year.

  8. Vanity Fair

    Get Kony

    This piece is a deep profile of Sam Childers, a former Hell's Angel and gun runner, turned born-again Christian preacher, who joined the guerrilla fighters in South Sudan. Urbina traveled with Childers, after he was ostensibly hired to kill a brutal warlord named Joseph Kony, leader of a group called the Lord's Resistance Army. In 2011, Childers' life story became the basis of a movie called Machine Gun Preacher, starring Gerard Butler.

  9. The New York Times

    Piles of Dirty Secrets Behind a Model ‘Clean Coal’ Project

    This investigation exposed worker safety and financial problems with a 20-billion-dollar project to build a plant in Kemper Mississippi that was supposed to be able to affordably convert coal into natural gas. A huge recipient of tax subsidies, the project was a centerpiece of President Obama’s climate plan even though it was plagued by problems that managers tried to conceal. The published story contributed to a federal investigation and the ultimate dismantling of the plant.

  10. The Atlantic

    The Capricious Use of Solitary Confinement Against Detained Immigrants

    Based on hundreds of thousands of pages of documents acquired via open-records requests and a whistle-blower, this investigation uncovered how the Obama and Trump administrations used solitary in ways that critics say are arbitrary, cruel, and in violation of federal rules.

  11. The New Yorker

    The Secretive Prisons That Keep Migrants Out of Europe

    Hoping to stop migrants arriving from Africa, the E.U. created a shadow immigration system that captures them before they reach its shores, and sends them to brutal Libyan detention centers run by militias. The story was published in more than 50 venues in 11 countries and led to outcry from the UN officials, human rights advocates and parliamentarians. While reporting the piece in Tripoli, Urbina was taken captive and violently abused by a militia.

  12. The New York Times

    Drilling Down (A Series)

    This 11-part series exposed the environmental, worker safety, and financial risks of fracking, a drilling technique driving the U.S. oil and gas boom. Among its many findings, the series revealed that, with little oversight, oil and gas companies were routinely sending highly radioactive drilling waste to sewage plants that were unequipped to treat it before it was discharged into rivers, sometimes less than a mile upstream from drinking-water intake plants. Municipal authorities were routinely using contaminated drilling waste to de-ice roads in winter and suppress dust in summer, sending millions of gallons of contaminated runoff into rivers. Senior E.P.A. officials bowed to political pressure and blocked research on some of the gas industry’s most hazardous practices. The focus of six Congressional hearings, the reporting also contributed to investigations of the fracking industry by the S.E.C., the New York Attorney General and the G.A.O.. The reporting won an award from The Society for Business Journalists, was the focus of an episode on Stephan Colbert’s show and became the basis for a Matt Damon and John Krasinski movie, Promised Land.

Appearances

All appearances

  1. Mayamada

    StoryXStory: Rhapsody on the Outlaw Ocean

     — Podcast

  2. NPR

    The World: Off the coast of Argentina, squid fishing carries a cost

     — Broadcast

  3. eM&M

    The AnteSocial: The reporting behind the Outlaw Ocean Podcast

     — Video

Awards

62 awards

  1. 2026  World Association of News Publishers

    Digital Media Awards Global

    Best Use of Audio

    Awarded for The Outlaw Ocean Podcast, Season 2

  2. 2026  The University of Texas as Austin

    Dan Rather Medal for News and Guts

    Professional Award Winner

    Awarded for The Outlaw Ocean Podcast, Season 2

  3. 2026  Society of Environmental Journalists

    24th Annual Awards for Reporting on the Environment

    Outstanding Explanatory Reporting

  4. 2026  One World Media

    Podcast & Radio Award

    Awarded for The Outlaw Ocean Podcast, Season 2

  5. 2026  Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights

    Book and Journalism Award

    Journalism Grand Prize & Radio Award

    Awarded for The Outlaw Ocean Podcast, Season 2

  6. 2026  World Association of News Publishers

    Digital Media Awards Americas

    Best Use of Audio

    Awarded for The Outlaw Ocean Podcast, Season 2

  7. 2025  Digiday

    Digiday Media Awards

    B50 Media Company of the Year

  8. 2025  Columbia Journalism School

    2025 duPont-Columbia Silver Baton Awards

    Silver Baton

    Awarded for China: The Superpower of Seafood

  9. 2025  Radio Television Digital News Association

    National Edward R. Murrow Award

    Excellence in Innovation

  10. 2025  Online News Association

    Online Journalism Awards

    Explanatory Reporting: Small Newsroom

  11. 2025  James Beard Foundation

    James Beard Journalism Award

    Investigative Reporting

    Awarded for China: The Superpower of Seafood, India: A Growing Goliath in Shrimp, The North Koreans Behind Global Seafood, The Whistleblower

  12. 2025  The Society for News Design (SND)

    46th Edition Award of Excellence in Page Design

    Investigative and International

    Awarded for India: A Growing Goliath in Shrimp, The Whistleblower

Adaptations

  • The Outlaw Ocean

    In 2015, Leonardo DiCaprio and several others collectively bought the scripted and non-scripted rights for The Outlaw Ocean book to produce a documentary series and a scripted feature about Urbina's reporting.

  • American Honey

    A 2007 Times investigation by Urbina about so-called "mag crews" — traveling groups of teenagers, many of them runaways or from broken homes, who sell magazine subscriptions — was adapted into the 2016 movie, American Honey, directed by Andrea Arnold and starring Shia LaBeouf.

  • Promised Land

    In interviews, Matt Damon and John Krasinski have said that their 2012 film Promised Land was partly inspired by the Times' investigative series, "Drilling Down."

  • Deepwater Horizon

    In 2011, Urbina’s reporting was part of a story optioned for the film, Deepwater Horizon with Mark Wahlberg.

  • Machine Gun Preacher

    In 2010, Urbina wrote a profile for Vanity Fair magazine on Sam Childers, a former Hell's Angel and gun runner, turned born-again Christian preacher, who joined the guerrilla fighters in South Sudan. Urbina traveled with Childers and a militia in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, after he was ostensibly hired to kill a brutal warlord named Joseph Kony, leader of a group called the Lord's Resistance Army. In 2011, Childers' life story became the basis of a movie called Machine Gun Preacher, starring Gerard Butler.

Organizations

  • The Outlaw Ocean Project

    A non-profit journalism organization based in Washington D.C. that produces investigative stories about human rights, environment and labor concerns on the two thirds of the planet covered by water.

  • The Outlaw Ocean Music Project

    A global effort to collaborate with musicians for the purpose of disseminating the outlaw ocean reporting to a younger and more diverse audience.

  • The Outlaw Ocean Mural Project

    Journalism explains the world. Art makes people feel. In melding the two, our goal is to refocus global attention offshore and to stoke urgency and curiosity about this often-overlooked domain.