Mónica Villamizar

Mónica Villamizar Villegas is a Colombian broadcast journalist, currently working for ABC News in their London Bureau as an international correspondent.

Career

Monica Villamizar is a freelance conflict reporter, recently awarded the EMMY Award for Best Investigative Documentary in Spanish and the Gerald Loeb Award for the investigation “The Source”, about child labor in Mexico’s Nestle coffee farms. On 2016 she was nominated for the prestigious One World Media “Journalist of the Year 2015” Award, which honors the best journalists in the world in all forms of media. Her current clients include PBS Newshour, Al Jazeera English, Vice News, Univision, Telemundo and The Weather Channel. Previously she was the London correspondent for CBS News affiliates. Monica has traveled to Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Mali, Mexico, El Salvador and Haiti, at times filming directly on the front lines. She has covered the drug of wars in Colombia and Mexico, gaining exclusive access to cocaine cartels in Medellin and Michoacan. In the Middle East she covered the Arab spring and the advance of ISIS into the Iraqi Kurdistan. More recently Monica has been dedicated to covering the advance of jihadism in West Africa. In her attempts to tell truthful, hard-hitting stories, Monica has been targeted by the Egyptian military which raided her office in Cairo and arrested her colleagues, and more recently by the Venezuelan Government who targeted her, labeling her a spy, and issuing an arrest warrant for her. In the case of her instance in Venezuela, the editorial board of the New York Times backed Monica as a reporter, denouncing the Maduro Government. This ignited her interest and active involvement in “Freedom of the Press” campaigns. Monica has been a board member of the Frontline Freelance Register, associated with London’s Frontline Club, which protects and promotes the integrity of Freelance conflict reporters all over the world.

Awards

2017 EMMY Award - Outstanding Investigative Journalism in Spanish - Cosecha de Miseria 2017 Gerard Loeb Award - Best Video, Harvest of Misery NBC Weather Channel/ Telemundo

Personal life

Villamizar is American and was born in Austin, Texas, United States. Hispanic naming-practice includes the maternal surname after the paternal name and so in a Latin American context she is also known as: Villamizar Villegas.

She completed in her education in France, with a master's degree in Political Science from the Institut d'Études Politiques in Paris.

External links

• Reel Mónica Villamizar
• TV reports by Ms Villamizar