Rudabeh Shahbazi is a general assignment reporter for ABC7 Eyewitness News. She joined the station in May 2011.
She returns to Los Angeles from Phoenix, Arizona, where she was at the forefront of numerous national stories, including extensive live coverage from the scene of the Tucson shooting that left six people dead and wounded 13 others, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

Rudabeh won an Emmy for her coverage of a stranded community waiting for government aid after a storm that paralyzed Arizona. She was also nominated for a political Emmy for her continuous coverage of Arizona’s controversial immigration law.

Rudabeh fell in love with the vibrant community of Los Angeles and the craft of journalism while she was a student at Pepperdine University, where she studied journalism and sociology. She went on to earn her Master’s degree at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Her education there included traveling to the Jordan-Iraq border to report on Iraqi refugees for a piece that appeared on PBS Frontline World’s website and resulted in the asylum of a civilian who was injured and lost her entire family in a bombing raid.
Prior to graduate school, Rudabeh worked on the film “King Leopold’s Ghost,” which documented atrocities and war crimes in the Congo while it was under Belgian rule. The film took first place at the Santa Barbara, Bermuda and Mumbai film festivals.

Rudabeh was also an education reporter at KEPR in Pasco, Washington and helped gather breaking news in the KTVU newsroom in the San Francisco Bay Area. She speaks Farsi and conversational Spanish.