Juanita León

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 a master's in journalism from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York. She worked as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal's "Americas" section 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 at Harvard, she went back to Colombia to create La Silla Vacía in 2009, as a 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.