Rudabeh Shahbazi

Rudabeh Shahbazi is a four-time Emmy award winning journalist and anchor on KCAL mornings from 6 to 10 a.m.  

Since returning to Southern California, she has won a Golden Mike Award for her reporting inside the operating room interviewing a patient while she was undergoing brain surgery and an Emmy for her coverage of the wildfires that ravaged Maui.  

Shahbazi returns to Southern California from Chicago, where she helped launch NewsNation, as one of its original national correspondents and anchors.  While there, she covered many of the country's biggest stories, including President Biden's inauguration from Delaware, the George Floyd and Jacob Blake cases and subsequent civil unrest, the Surfside condo collapse in Florida and deadly tornadoes in Kentucky, as well as features about national parks, music communes and profiles of women-owned businesses across the country.

Shahbazi served as the main anchor at WFOR-TV in Miami for five years, where she anchored live continuous coverage of the Pulse nightclub and Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Airport shootings, the Parkland school massacre, Hurricanes Matthew, Irma and Maria, President Obama's visit to Cuba to normalize relations with the U.S. and the death of Fidel Castro among other stories.  She was voted Best Anchor in Miami by the Miami New Times and one of the "Most Influential Women" of South Florida by Ocean Drive Magazine.

Shahbazi knows the communities of Southern California well from her time as a reporter and fill-in anchor at KABC-TV in Los Angeles.  Previously, she was a reporter at KNXV-TV in Phoenix, where she covered the US-Mexico border and was one of the first reporters on the ground in Tucson after the mass shooting and attempted assassination of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

Shahbazi got her start on the air as an education reporter at KEPR-TV in Pasco, Washington, and worked behind the scenes at KTVU-TV in Oakland, California.  She also has a background in documentary filmmaking, working on the award-winning "King Leopold's Ghost," about Belgian rule in Congo, and from the Middle East, including for PBS Frontline World, reporting on Iraqi refugees in Jordan shortly after the U.S. invasion.  She has more than a decade of experience behind the camera as a photojournalist and editor in major markets across the country.

Shahbazi has a BA in journalism from Pepperdine University and an MA from the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.