Matthew Kaminski Keynote Speaker

Matthew (Matt) Kaminski is the cofounder of Politico Europe & former Editor in Chief of Politico (2019-2023).  He is a leading commentator on politics and global affairs and as a senior media executive he has valuable experience of running a media enterprise in a time of great technological and societal change.

He writes a regular column for POLITICO on Geopolitics, aa well as magazine features.

Over the past decade, Matt helped make POLITICO the leading transatlantic publication on politics and policy. He was the founding editor-in-chief of POLITICO Europe, which launched in 2015. It quickly established itself as the most influential publication on EU affairs – and one of the most successful media startups of the digital era. He took the top editor’s job in Washington at the start of 2019, overseeing a period of unprecedented growth and journalistic impact for the company.

Matt built out its national security, legal, tech and energy & environment offerings. POLITICO has operations across nine-time zones and publishes in three languages. Its reporting on the pandemic, its “scoop of the century” on the Supreme Court’s draft ruling to overturn abortion rights and its political coverage was recognized by the George Polk, Pulitzer and other awards. Matt led the newsroom through the publication’s sale to Axel Springer in late 2021, in the biggest digital media deal ever. Since late 2023, Kaminski has been acting as POLITICO’s editor-at-large, writing his column and other features. He also advises an AI startup, and serves on the boards of Partners Group (Asia) and World Minds.

Born in Warsaw, Matt emigrated to the U.S. with his family at the age of eight and grew up in Washington. He has bounced between both sides of the Atlantic throughout his career. He started reporting on Ukraine and other parts of the former Soviet Union for the Financial Times in 1993, before even graduating from Yale. He was then a foreign correspondent, editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal in Brussels, Paris and New York for nearly two decades. Matt was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and the winner of the Overseas Press Club Award for his coverage of Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2014. His reporting on the European Union won the Peter Weitz Prize, awarded by the German Marshall Fund in 2004. Matt lives in Washington DC with his wife Alexandra Geneste, a French journalist and author.