Tanya McRae is an anchor for Spectrum News 1 SoCal. Tanya grew up on the East Coast in New York and Massachusetts. She attended the University of Pennsylvania and graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the Annenberg School for Communication. She also played on the Penn Women’s Varsity Basketball team, in the intramural basketball league, and rode on the equestrian team. Her first job in television was as an Assignment Desk Assistant for ABC World News Tonight and Nightline in NYC. She then went on to work for local, cable, and national news outlets including Channel One News and the NBC affiliate in Palm Springs. She was nominated for two local Emmy Awards in 2008 for investigative stories she did for KMIR 6.

A few years later, she came to Los Angeles to visit a friend and immediately fell in love with the energy and cultural diversity of the city. She packed up everything from her home in Brooklyn and moved to LA permanently without looking back! Almost three decades later, Tanya’s love for SoCal life has only grown.

In 2018, Tanya was one of the first multimedia journalists and reporters hired to launch the Spectrum News 1 network in Los Angeles. Two years later, she was promoted to anchor and named the host of the award-winning public affairs program “In Focus SoCal.” She says her passion for talking to all different types of people allows her to delve into current events, civic issues, community engagement, and local politics. Tanya’s goal as a journalist is to provide people with unbiased information about things that are impacting their daily lives, as well as to tell compelling and thought-provoking stories in a way that encourages people to reflect and maybe even look at issues in a new light.

In addition to her work in news, Tanya also has an extensive background producing and field directing lifestyle, travel, newsmagazine, reality, docu-series, and talk shows. She’s traveled to many states and even a few countries working on projects for NBC, CBS, Lifetime Television, Bravo, Oprah Winfrey Network, Travel Channel, and many other networks. Tanya was nominated for two national Daytime Emmy Awards and won an Emmy in 2015 for Outstanding Lifestyle Program as a Senior Producer for the OWN series, “Home Made Simple.”

Tanya is a current member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, Los Angeles Press Club, National Association of Black Journalists, and Radio & Television News Association of Southern California. She has also served as Vice President of NABJ’s Los Angeles chapter (NABJLA).

You can find Tanya on Instagram tanya_mcrae777, Twitter @TanyaMcRaeSoCal, and Facebook.