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.
