Biography of James Wright Foley

James Wright Foley was born October 18, 1973, in Evanston, IL and grew up in Wolfeboro, NH. After graduating from Marquette University in 1996, he spent several years teaching with Teach for America at Lowell Elementary School in the inner city of Phoenix, AZ. He later attended the Master of Fine Arts program for creative writing at University of Massachusetts, Amherst (2000-2003) and the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University (2007-2008).  

Foley began his career as a journalist in Medill’s Chicago and Washington, D.C. newsrooms, reporting on pollution in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago where he lived and international affairs and the military during a quarter in D.C. After graduating from Medill, he became an embedded journalist with the Indiana National Guard in Iraq in 2008. Foley then worked for the USAID-funded Tatweer Project in Baghdad. For the next few years, he traveled back and forth from work with the Tatweer Project in Iraq and military embeds with the United States Army in eastern Afghanistan.  

In early 2011, the Arab Spring protests turned into civil war in Libya and, following his dismissal from a post reporting for Stars and Stripes, Foley entered this new frontier as a freelance journalist for GlobalPost. On April 5, 2011, Foley and his colleagues Clare Gillis and Manu Brabo were captured by Libyan loyalist soldiers and their friend and colleague Anton Hammerl was killed. They were held captive by the Gaddafi regime for 44 days before being released on May 18, 2011. Foley would return to Libya later that year and report on the fall of the regime in October 2011.  

In 2012, Foley began to make trips in and out of Syria to report on the civil war taking place there. In October 2012, he made a trip home to celebrate his birthday and then returned to Syria. On Thanksgiving Day, November 22, 2012, he was kidnapped with fellow journalist John Cantlie in northwest Syria on their way out of the country by a militant Islamist group that would come to be known as the Islamice State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).  

On August 19, 2014, a video showing Foley’s murder was released by his captors.

Within weeks of his murder, the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation was created.