El-Khodary was born in Gaza and holds an undergraduate degree in communications from the American University in Cairo and an MS in mass communication from Murray State University, which she attended as a Fulbright Scholar.[5][6] El-Khodary later returned to the U.S. to take up a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 2006 as the Ruth Cowan Nash Fellow,[7][8] and again in 2010 as a Heinrich Boell Fellow and Visiting Scholar with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.[9][10]