Meet Our 2019 BRIClab Visiting Scholars

Gabriela Sá Pessoa

Gabriela Sá Pessoa is a reporter for Folha de S.Paulo, a leading Brazilian daily newspaper. In 2015, she was awarded the Roche Health Journalism Prize from the The Gabriel García Márquez New Iberoamerican Journalism Foundation, for an investigation into legal abortion in Brazil. The story was first published in 2014 by Agencia Pública, a nonprofit journalism organization. Gabriela has been reporting for Folha de S.Paulo since 2014. She currently writes about politics but has also covered the entertainment and television industries for the paper. In 2018, she participated in the data journalism trainee program offered by the GoogleNews Lab, where she learned to code with Python and manage big datasets to support her stories. She also covered Brazil’s national elections in 2018 and President Jair Bolsonaro’s inauguration in Brasilia.

Juliana Gragnani

Juliana Gragnani is a Brazilian journalist from BBC Brazil, based in London. During the last year, she has written investigative pieces about fake profiles and disinformation used to influence elections in Brazil. In 2018, she received the Petrobras Journalism Award for her work revealing how one company based in Rio created hundreds of fake profiles maintained by people all over the country and sold them to politicians during the 2014 Brazilian elections.

Before working at the BBC, she worked for 5 years in Folha de S.Paulo, the leading print daily newspaper in Brazil. She wrote about public policies regarding culture in the cultural section of the paper and then became news assignment editor for the section. Later, she went back to working as a reporter in Folha’s City section, where she covered security, homelessness, education and lifestyle.