Juanita Leon is completing her Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. She was born in Colombia and graduated from law school before moving to New York to obtain her M.S. from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, after which she took a position with the American edition of the Wall Street Journal. She returned to her native country in 1988.

Since then, she has worked as an editor for the country’s largest daily newspaper, El Tiempo, and then for Unidad de Paz, that paper’s special supplement on the peace process in Colombia. In 2000 she began to work as reporter and editor at Colombia’s most important current affairs weekly La Semana, covering in particular the armed conflict in the country. She then worked as the editor of that magazine’s online publication, semana.com. She has also worked as an investigative reporter for the TV series “Tiempos difficiles” and “Regreso a la Esperanza.”

Leon edited Anos de fuego (2001), an anthology of the best Colombian reportage of the 1990s. In 2004, she published No Somos muchos pero somos machos, a collection of her reportage on civil resistance by Colombia’s indigenous people. Her work has also appeared in many journalism anthologies.

Her book, Pais de plomo. Cronicas de Guerra (2005) is a detailed portrait of the victims and protagonists of Colombia’s deadly armed conflict at the beginning of the 21st century. She has won the Lettre Ulysses Award for the art of reportage, the WHO’s World Prize for Health Journalism and was a finalist for the Fundacion para un Nuevo Perioismo Iberoamericano - Cemex journalism prize in 2002. She has taught journalism at the Unversidad de los Andes in Bogota.