Maria Teresa Ronderos is director of the Program on Independent Journalism at the Open Society Foundations, based in London. She comes to OSF from Semana, Colombia’s leading news magazine, where she served in a range of senior editorial roles. Together with the Ideas for Peace Foundation, she created VerdadAbierta.com, a website that has covered armed conflict in Colombia since 2008. She served as its editor-in-chief until coming to OSF.
Ronderos serves on a number of boards including the García Márquez Iberoamerican Foundation for New Journalism, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Flip, Colombia’s Foundation for Freedom of the Press, where as chair she worked to protect the lives of journalists in danger.
An experienced teacher, Ronderos has trained professional journalists from across Latin America and led workshops, online courses, and seminars on investigative journalism, politics, and social and economic issues.
In 2013, Ronderos and her team at VerdadAbierta.com won the Simon Bolivar National Award, Colombia’s highest journalism award, for best investigative reporting. Among other awards, Ronderos has also received the King of Spain Iberoamerican Award in Madrid and the Maria Moors Cabot Award from Columbia University in New York.