Athena Jones serves as a CNN national correspondent based in New York. She was formerly a CNN White House correspondent, covering President Trump and his administration for all of the network's programs and platforms.

Jones started with the network as a general assignment correspondent in 2011. She has reported on politics and on a wide range of general news stories for programs across the network from breaking news to national stories. She has covered debates over immigration reform, the Affordable Care Act, the war against ISIS and debt and budget issues, in addition to protests against police brutality, Ebola, the Covid-19 pandemic, the #MeToo movement, Supreme Court decisions, weather events and the arts.

Previously, Jones was a White House producer with NBC, where she wrote packages, produced story segments and reported on air for MSNBC and NBC News. Jones covered the presidential campaigns of then-Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama during the 2008 election cycle for NBC and the National Journal. Prior to her work at NBC, Jones served as a freelance segment producer for CNN. In addition, from 2001 to 2003, she worked as a reporter for Reuters based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she covered the Argentine presidential elections, the farm industry, the collapse of the country's economy and other general news stories. Prior to Reuters, Jones reported on politics and the economy in both Chile and Argentina for Bloomberg News.

Jones graduated cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in Government and earned her master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. She studied Spanish language, literature and arts and European politics at the University of Madrid Complutense in Madrid, Spain; and Islamic studies at the American Research Center in Cairo, Egypt, with Duke University.