She graduated from Columbia University in 1967, having studied Political Science at Barnard College and Chinese at the East Asia Institute.

[1] Her father, Joseph V. Foa, had been forced to leave Italy when dictator Benito Mussolini enacted the Italian racial laws.

There she met Kate Webb, the United Press International (UPI) bureau chief, who advised her to go to Saigon, South Vietnam.

Her reporting brought Richard Moose and James G. Lowenstein, Indo-China investigators for the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, to Phnom Penh.

"[citation needed] From 1991 to March 1995, Foa served as the spokesperson and Chief of Public Information for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva.

[7][8] Foa often covered refugee situations, speaking on behalf of displaced Kurds in Iraq, Banyarwanda in Rwanda and Bosnians.

When Serb troops moved against the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica, Foa urged the international community to speed up the deployment of peacekeepers to the region.

370 lightly armed Dutchbat of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) were unable to stop the capture of the town and the subsequent massacre.

In July 1996, Burundi looked on the verge of repeating the 1994 Rwandan genocide beginning with the massacre of at least 304 people in Bugendana.

"[10] Together with the then head of the UN Peacekeeping Department, Kofi Annan, Foa aimed to put emotional pressure on the U.S. and other Western powers through the media.

In a profile in The New York Times, Barbara Crossette wrote that "when Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali put Ms. Foa, a strong-willed and irreverent former journalist, in charge of his public image and that of the world organization in January, some diplomats were aghast.

"[12] As a spokesperson, Foa frequently clashed with the Clinton administration over its unpaid due to the UN and its seeming determination to oust Boutros-Ghali as the Secretary-General.

"[13][14] Foa, aware that Washington was determined to veto Boutros-Ghali for a second term, had made a symbolic statement about its unwillingness to pay dues.

At the end of Boutros-Ghali's term, Foa moved to Israel to live with her long-time partner, businessman Shmuel Dankner.

She occasionally undertakes missions for the United Nations or NGOs in Liberia and Uganda and teaches a course at local universities entitled "So, You Want To Change the World?"