Heather Anne De Lisle (born August 17, 1976, in Landstuhl, West Germany) is an American television former presenter at the international broadcaster Deutsche Welle and a radio correspondent for ABC News.[1] [2]
De Lisle is the daughter of radio disc jockey Rik De Lisle. At the age of 15, she hosted her first radio broadcast on American Forces Network (Berlin).[1] She studied at the University of Maryland, and attended the SRT – School for Broadcast Technology (now known as the ARD-ZDF Media Academy) in Nuremberg.[3]
Since 1995 she has worked freelance for Deutsche Welle, first presenting the weather, then sports, and as a newsreader since 2001. Since the age of seven she has also worked as a voice actor for film, television, and computer games. She has also worked as a foreign correspondent since 2000 for ABC News Radio in New York in charge of reporting from the German capital. In film dubbing, she was a casting director at the Speaker-Search voice talent agency in Berlin from 2007 to 2008.
De Lisle is a regular guest on the German current-events show Studio Press Club and the news channel N24. A vocal conservative, she describes herself as " apparently the only American journalist in Germany who is committed to the Republican Party".
In September 2010 De Lisle published her first book, the German-language Amiland, named for a slang term for the U.S., in which she took issue with the uncritical reception given Barack Obama in Germany and defended the U.S. against various stereotypes. She lives in Berlin,[4] is married to a German and is mother to a son.[1]
In December 2011 De Lisle suffered a stroke, which resulted in a serious Aphasia. Since then, she has regained functional - and to a certain extent conversational - use of both English and German.[5] De Lisle took part in a 2014 Study by Charité on regaining brain function using externally provided electrical stimulation.[6]