Skip to content
The Outlaw Ocean Project
Ian Urbina

Ian Urbina

Director & Founder of The Outlaw Ocean Project

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

Publications

  1. The New York Times Magazine

    The Dirty Secret Behind the Farmed Fish You Eat

    Read in The New York Times MagazineRead the 28 story investigation

  2. NBC News

    The Whistleblower

    Read now

  3. The New Yorker

    The North Koreans Behind Global Seafood

    Read nowRead in The New Yorker

  4. The New Yorker

    The Uyghurs Forced to Process the World’s Fish

    Read nowRead in The New Yorker

  5. The New Yorker

    A Fleet Prone to Captive Labor and Plunder

    Read nowRead in The New Yorker

  6. The New Yorker

    The Secretive Prisons That Keep Migrants Out of Europe

    Read nowRead in The New Yorker
More reporting

Appearances

  1. France 24

    Farmed fish, an environmental and human tragedy

     — Broadcast

  2. TaiwanPlus

    Farmed Fish in Xinjiang, Tibet Linked to Forced Labor in Global Seafood Supply

     — Video

  3. CBC News

    The Broadcast with Paula Gale: Food for Feed

     — Podcast

  4. CBC News

    The Current: The hidden costs of fish feed

     — Broadcast

  5. Mayamada

    StoryXStory: Rhapsody on the Outlaw Ocean

     — Podcast

  6. NPR

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

     — Broadcast

More appearances

Awards

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.