For almost a decade, Annabell has been the Middle East Correspondent for the Belgian National Broadcaster VRT producing crossmedia stories for television, radio and the broadcaster's website. She was also the Middle East correspondent for the daily newspapers De Tijd (Belgium), Trouw (NL) and De Persdienst (NL). Since 2016 she works as journalist for The Washington Post and producer for BBC and CNN.
Annabell is a graduate in Middle Eastern studies and Arabic. She finished her masters in Cairo, where she was based from 2008 till 2015. She has been active as a senior producer for both breaking news and in-depth investigative documentaries for Belgian, Dutch and international broadcasters mainly in war and conflict zones such as Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Jordan and more recently Belgium and France in the wake of the IS attacks.
As a freelance writer she contributed to international outlets such as The Guardian, Vice, Al Jazeera English, Middle East Eye, Syria Deeply and IPS in addition to her work published in Belgian and Dutch outlets such as De Tijd, De Morgen, NRCnext, De Groene Amsterdammer, MO*, Knack, Financieele Dagblad, Nederlands Dagblad, De Correspondent,...
Occasionally she writes in Arabic.
She is also a sworn translator for Arabic and Egyptian colloquial and worked as a teacher of Arabic at the K.U.Leuven University (Belgium). She previously was a consultant for the World Bank on governance, financial management and procurement in the MENA region and was the organiser of a Media Training for Iraqis at ATiT (Leuven) in 2012.
