Ana Arana

Ana Arana is an investigative journalist with extensive international experience. A former U.S. foreign correspondent, she is currently based in Mexico City where she is director of Fundacion MEPI, an investigative journalist project that promotes binational and regional investigative projects.

Arana was a media trainer for various international groups, including the Inter American Press Association and the International Center for Foreign Journalists. She conducted trainings in Africa, Latin America, and South and East Asia. Between 2007-2008 she was a Knight International Journalism Fellow in Mexico, where she worked with various dailies, training journalists and building investigative units. One of the investigative teams she trained at El Universal won Mexico’s National Press Award in 2008.

Her journalism work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Marie Claire, Newsweek, Salon.com, The Columbia Journalism Review, the New York Daily News, Business Week, and the Village Voice, among others. In 2003, she worked in West Africa with the Open Society Initiative of West Africa, a George Soros foundation. Between 1987 and 1993, Arana was a foreign correspondent in Colombia and Central America and reporting for The Miami Herald, CBS News, and The Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. She is also a former reporter for the San Jose Mercury News and worked as an associate producer for various television channels in California, including KCET-TV in Los Angeles. Between 1993 and 1996 she served as the Americas Coordinator for the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), where she assisted in the creation of regional press freedom groups, including the Fundacion para la Libertad de Prensa, FLIP, and was the author of a report on the murder of immigrant journalists in the United States. She has an MS from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.