Dana Perino

Dana Perino has been married to Peter McMahon since 1998. They met on a commercial flight in 1997, and later moved to England before returning to the United States.

Perino had a Vizsla named Jasper, who died in 2021. She and McMahon later acquired another Vizsla named Percy.

Perino grew up in Denver, Colorado, after being born in Evanston, Wyoming. Her family background includes Italian ancestry, with two of her paternal great-grandparents having immigrated from Turin, Piedmont. Her childhood included time helping relatives on a Wyoming ranch, where she cared for young cattle, maintained water supplies, searched for dinosaur fossils, and sledded through gullies.

She studied mass communications, political science, and Spanish at Colorado State University Pueblo, where she participated in the debate team and worked at KTSC-TV. She later earned a master's degree in public affairs reporting from the University of Illinois Springfield while working as a daily reporter covering the Illinois Capitol for WCIA-TV. During college, she also worked overnight as a country music radio DJ.

Perino began her Washington career as a staff assistant for Representative Scott McInnis and then spent nearly four years as press secretary for Representative Dan Schaefer. She later worked as a spokesperson for the Department of Justice before joining the White House Council on Environmental Quality as its director of communications.

Perino joined the George W. Bush administration in 2002 as an associate director of communications for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Her responsibilities included media relations, message development, public outreach, and coordinating communications on environmental, energy, and natural-resource issues.

She became deputy press secretary in 2005 and served as acting White House press secretary from March 27 to April 30, 2007, while Tony Snow underwent treatment for colon cancer. Bush appointed Perino as assistant to the president and White House press secretary in September 2007, and she held the position until the administration ended in January 2009. She was the second woman to serve as White House press secretary, after Dee Dee Myers.

During a December 2008 press conference in Baghdad, an Iraqi journalist threw two shoes at Bush. Bush avoided the shoes, but Perino suffered an eye injury from a microphone stand during the resulting commotion.

After leaving the White House, Perino became a political commentator for Fox News and a regular co-host of The Five. She hosted The Daily Briefing with Dana Perino beginning in 2017 before joining Bill Hemmer as co-anchor of America's Newsroom in 2021.

Perino co-hosted the limited-series podcast Perino & Stirewalt: I'll Tell You What with Chris Stirewalt in 2016. Fox News Radio later announced her podcast Perino on Politics, and in 2023 she moderated the second Republican presidential primary debate on Fox Business with Stuart Varney and Ilia Calderón.

Her other television appearances include a guest-host role on Gutfeld! and an appearance on Jeopardy! during the program's 2012 Power Players week, where she competed against Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and David Faber.

Perino is the author of And the Good News Is...: Lessons and Advice from the Bright Side, Let Me Tell You about Jasper...: How My Best Friend Became America's Dog, and Everything Will Be Okay: Life Lessons for Young Women (from a Former Young Woman). She also served as editorial director of the Crown Forum imprint at Random House.

In 2010, President Barack Obama nominated Perino to the Broadcasting Board of Governors, and the Senate confirmed her appointment. She also taught political communications part-time at George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management and received an honorary doctorate of Humane Letters from Colorado State University Pueblo in 2023.