Ellana Lee is Group Senior Vice President, General Manager APAC, and Global Head of Productions for CNN International. Based in the network’s Asia Pacific headquarters in Hong Kong, she is CNN’s most senior executive outside of the United States.

As General Manager APAC, Lee heads the operation of CNN and its multi-platform editorial output in the Asia Pacific region, managing an acclaimed roster of correspondents and newsgathering teams across eight bureaus from Pakistan to Japan and China to New Zealand.

In the newly created role of Global Head of Productions, she oversees an international team focused on developing and producing sponsored editorial features content across all platforms, encompassing long-form series, documentaries and specials. This unique position within CNN will also see Lee spearheading the creation of new roles in the United States to strengthen and expand the existing Features team, currently based across Atlanta, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, and London.

CNN’s features production is an integrated, cross-platform, award-winning creative team, producing more than 1000 hours of premium original programming every year. Working in tandem with CNN’s digital, TV, product, programming, marketing, communications, and commercial teams globally, CNN’s features content attracts commercial partnerships with some of the world’s most dynamic and successful brands.

Under Lee’s management, CNN has received a variety of prestigious awards including Emmy Awards in 2022 for Outstanding Hard News Feature Story for a powerful report on an Afghan child bride and contributions in Breaking News for the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in 2023 and the Israel-Hamas War in 2024. Other accolades include Breaking News Awards from the Royal Television Society TV Journalism Awards for coverage of the Hong Kong protests in 2019 and Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine in 2023 and Best News Coverage in 2013 of its reporting of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. CNN International was also crowned the RTS News Channel of the Year in 2012 and 2013.

Lee was an integral part of CNN’s coverage of the historic Inter-Korean and the Trump-Kim summits in 2019 and 2018. She has traveled to North Korea several times and in mid-2017 originated an exclusive report called Secret State: Inside North Korea. The 60-minute documentary followed CNN cameras inside the secretive nation and was awarded Best Documentary Program at the Asian Academy Creative Awards in 2018.

Lee has received numerous personal accolades including being honoured on the Cablefax Diversity List in 2022 and named ContentAsia’s ‘Asia Media Woman of the Year’ in 2018 for her commitment to the news media industry. In recognition of her leadership position, Lee was named a ‘Young Global Leader’ by the World Economic Forum and now sits on the board of the Young Global Leaders Foundation. She is an Asia 21 fellow, as awarded by the Asia Society, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations as well as of The Nature Conservancy’s Asia Pacific Council. She is also a Melo CEO for Project Melo in Hong Kong and sits on the advisory board of The Murrow Centre at Tufts University.

Prior to her current role, Lee has had a longstanding and accomplished career at CNN, beginning in New York as a producer to help launch the program ‘In The Money’. She subsequently worked as a business producer and a senior planning producer, coordinating major events out of the Asia Pacific before assuming leadership of the region.

Lee holds a Master’s degree in Broadcast Journalism from New York University and an undergraduate degree in History and International Relations from Georgetown University. She is a graduate of Harvard’s ‘Global Leadership and Public Policy for the 21st Century’ Executive Program.