WHERE WE REPORT


Juanita León

AMAZON RJF GRANTEE

Rainforest
Journalism Fund
Amazon

Juanita León is a Colombian award-winning journalist, founder and director of La Silla Vacía, a pioneer digital news media in Colombia. León obtained a law degree at the University of the Andes in Bogotá and an M.S. in Journalism from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York. She worked as a reporter on the Wall Street Journal Americas before returning to Colombia in 1998.

In Colombia, León worked for the newspaper El Tiempo and for Semana magazine. She was editor-in-chief of the weekly's website. After a Nieman Fellowship in Harvard, she went back to Colombia to create La Silla Vacía in 2009, as a pioneer native digital media in Latin America.
She's published several books, including "Country of Bullets: chronicles of war" and "10,000 horas en La Silla Vacía, periodismo y poder en un nuevo mundo".

She has won several awards, including the prestigious Premio Gabo for her coverage of the peace process with Farc in Colombia in 2016.

Photo of Juanita León