Marianela Balbi

Venezuelan journalist. For 11 years, she has directed the NGO Instituto Prensa y Sociedad, Ipys Venezuela, a civil society organization that defends the right to freedom of expression, access to public information and promotes the professional development of journalists in Venezuela. She has developed collaborative networks for investigative reporting. She directed the report Owners of Censorship carried out in 2015, one of the three finalist works for the Gabo Award from the FNPI. As director of the team of more than 30 journalists from Ipys Venezuela, she received the Roche-FNPI (Gabo Foundation) award on his behalf for the Best Coverage of a Health issue in Latin America, with the report "Huérfanos de la Salud" in 2018.

Designs and coordinates the program of training workshops and training in Investigative Journalism of Ipys Venezuela; and the Advanced Studies Program in Investigative Journalism with the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas, Venezuela, where he teaches Narrative Journalism and Storytelling in Investigative Journalism.

As a journalist and non-fiction writer, she published the book El rapto de la odalisca (The kidnapping of the odalisque) (Debate, 2009), journalistic investigation about the theft of a masterpiece by Henri Matisse from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Caracas. And in 2014, he published Soy Bárbara, soy especial (I am Barbara, I am Special) (Planeta, 2014), a life story about Bárbara Rondón Mendoza, a woman with Down Syndrome and her fight for her intellectual growth and inclusion in a society accompanied by sustained support of the family.

During the first 20 years of her career, she did cultural and literary journalism for newspapers and magazines in Venezuela and Latin America. She was Editor-in-Chief of Cultural Information and Entertainment in the newspapers El Nacional; and has made reports, interviews and chronicles for magazines and publications in Venezuela and Latin America.

She is a Member of the Ifex Global Council since April 2019, and was coordinator of the Ifex LAC Committee, a diverse global and regional network of more than 100 non-governmental organizations that promote and defend the right to freedom of expression as a fundamental human right.