Margarita Simonovna Simonyan (born 6 April 1980) is a Russian media executive and propagandist. She is the editor-in-chief of the Russian broadcaster RT, as well as the media group Rossiya Segodnya.

Simonyan covered the Second Chechen War in the 2000s while working as a journalist. Subsequently, she worked at Krasnodar television, was VGTRK's own correspondent in Rostov-on-Don, and worked as a special correspondent for the Vesti TV news program. She is a member of the board of directors of Channel One Russia and a member of the Academy of Russian Television [ru]. At the age of 25, she was appointed head of Russia Today, now known as RT.

In 2022 and 2023, Simonyan was sanctioned by the European Union as "a central figure of the Russian Government propaganda". She was sanctioned by the United Kingdom and Ukraine in relation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In 2024, she was sanctioned by the United States for alleged interference in the 2024 United States elections. Simonyan is the widow of film director and actor, Tigran Keosayan.

The Financial Times placed her in its list of the most influential people of 2025 in the Leaders category. It described her as "Putin’s most devoted envoy” and a “Valkyrie of propaganda".

Simonyan was born in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar, into an Armenian family. Both her parents are descendants of Armenian refugees from the Ottoman Empire. Her father's family, originally from Trabzon, settled in Crimea during the Armenian genocide of 1915. During World War II, they were deported by Stalin's NKVD secret police to the Urals along with thousands of other Hamshen Armenians. Her father was born in Yekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk). Her mother was born in Sochi to an Armenian family that had fled the massacres of the Armenians by the Turks in the late 19th century. Her two grandfathers were World War II veterans. Simonyan has described herself as both Armenian and Russian.

Her family owns a restaurant in the town of Moldovka in Adlersky City District, Sochi. Simonyan has stated that she is from a working-class family and decided at an early age that she wanted to become a journalist, first working for the local newspaper, and then for a local television station while studying journalism at Kuban State University.

She spent a year as an exchange student in Bristol, New Hampshire, in 1995 under the FLEX Program (Future Leaders Exchange Program).

Simonyan, as a correspondent, covered the Second Chechen War, and also serious flooding of the Krasnodar region, for her local television station, receiving an award for "professional courage". In 2002, she became a regional correspondent for Russia's national Rossiya television channel and covered the 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis. Simonyan, one of the first correspondents to arrive at the scene, witnessed the killing of 334 people, 186 of them children. She told an interviewer "It was the worst thing that ever happened to me," and that she 'cried frequently' while trying to write about it. She then moved to Moscow where she joined the Russian pool of Kremlin reporters.