Orville Schell was born in New York City and graduated from Harvard University Magna Cum Laude in Far Eastern History.

Professor Schell then studied Chinese language at Stanford University, was an exchange student at National Taiwan University and finally received his MA and Ph.d (abd) from the University of California, Berkeley.

He has worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia and covered the war in Indochina for magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly and the New Republic. Since then, he has written widely for many other magazine and newspapers,including The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Harpers, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Wired, Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, the China Quarterly, Harpers and the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. He has also authored fourteen books, nine on China, and is at work on, a new book, an interpretation of the last 100 years of Chinese history.

Schell was a Fellow at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and the recipient of many prizes and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Overseas Press Club Award, and the Harvard-Stanford Shorenstein Prize in Asian Journalism.

Prof. Schell, the former Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, was recently appointed by the Asia Society as the Arthur Ross Director to set up its new Center on US China Relations in New York City.

He is a Fellow at the Weatherhead East Asian Insititute at Columbia University, a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg School of Communications at USC and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.