Irene Virag, MA

Associate Dean for Student Affairs
Undergraduate Program Director
Lecturer

Contact Prof. Virag

Irene Virag is the associate dean for student affairs and undergraduate program director at the Stony Brook School of Communication and Journalism. She is a member of the founding faculty of the SoCJ, where she teaches narrative and magazine writing.

She won a Pulitzer Prize as a member of the Newsday team the chronicled the story of Baby Jane Doe, an infant with spina bifida, and the political struggle over her treatment. She was also a Pulitzer finalist for feature writing and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. She was inducted into the Garden Writers Hall of Fame and was named a "Great American Gardener" by the American Horticultural Society, which honored her with its national award for inspirational garden writing. She is a 10-time winner of the New York Newswoman's Club Front Page Award.

Her story, "Chemo: The Slayer and the Savior" - part of a series she wrote about her breast cancer - was included in the American Society of Newspaper Editors' "Best Newspaper Writing of 1998." She was a lead writer for Newsday's 13-month series "Long Island: Our Natural World." During her 25-year Newsday career, she wrote a garden column, a nature column, a home column and the "Long Island Diary" as well as numerous award-winning narrative stories and series. 

Virag has interviewed murderers and movie stars and traveled to Vietnam to bring a homeless handicapped Amerasian child back to the land of the father who abandoned him. She wrote a year-long series about women fighting breast cancer and when she was diagnosed just months later, she wrote about her own breast cancer.

Virag left her job as garden columnist and home and garden editor of Newsday to make her way in the freelance world and has contributed to numerous magazines. She is the author of two books, "We're All in This Together - Families Facing Breast Cancer" and "Gardening on Long Island with Irene Virag."

She earned a bachelor's degree from Boston University and a master's degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she was named a Harrington Scholar as the top graduate student in the newspaper journalism program. She studied at the University of London.