Born in the Philippines, Maria Ressa moved to the United States with her family when she was nine years old. She grew up in New Jersey and graduated from Princeton University, then returned to the Philippines and spent nearly two decades as a lead investigative reporter in Southeast Asia for CNN, well known especially for exposing the violence and abuse of power characterizing the regime of President Rodrigo Duterte.
In 2012 Ressa cofounded the Rappler, a digital news site leading the fight for press freedom in the Philippines as well as documenting the dangers of social media. In 2021 she was one of two journalists awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.”
Ressa is the first Filipino Nobel Prize laureate. In her Nobel Lecture, she said, “I’ve worked in conflict zones and war zones in Asia, reported on hundreds of disasters — and while I have seen so much bad, I have also documented so much good, when people who have nothing offer you what they have.... This is what we lose when we live in a world of fear and violence.”
Ressa is the author of three books: Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of Al-Qaeda’s Newest Center (2003), From Bin Laden to Facebook: 10 Days of Abduction, 10 Years of Terrorism (2013), and How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future (2022). In 2024 she became a professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
