Maria A. Ressa

Maria Ressa co-founded Rappler, the top digital-only news site that is leading the fight for press freedom in the Philippines. As Rappler’s CEO, Ressa has endured constant political harassment and arrests by the previous Filipino government headed by Rodrigo Duterte and forced to post bail ten times to stay free. Rappler’s battle for truth and democracy is the subject of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival documentary, A Thousand Cuts.

In October 2021, Ressa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.”

In her talks, Ressa connects the dots as to how social media and recent technological developments often deceive and entrench political power, a dilemma that we all face.

For her courage and work on disinformation and ‘fake news,’ Ressa was named one of Time Magazine’s 2018 Person of the Year, was among its 100 Most Influential People of 2019, and has also been named one of Time’s Most Influential Women of the Century.

Before co-founding Rappler, Ressa focused on investigating terrorism in Southeast Asia. She opened and ran CNN’s Manila Bureau for nearly a decade before moving to Indonesia and opening the network’s Jakarta bureau, which she ran from 1995 to 2005. That was when she returned to Manila as the senior vice president in charge of ABS-CBN’s multimedia news operations, managing almost a thousand journalists for the largest news organization in the country.

Ressa’s most recent book, "How to Stand Up to a Dictator," was released in 2022 and has been translated into 20 languages, with more to come in 2024. It is an urgent cry for readers worldwide to recognize and understand the dangers to our freedoms before it is too late.

She is an inaugural Carnegie Distinguished Fellow at Columbia University’s newly launched Institute of Global Politics, where she leads projects related to artificial intelligence and democracy. In July 2024, she will join the faculty of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs as a professor of professional practice.

Ressa focuses critical attention on the breakdown of our global information ecosystem and how interconnected communities of action can hold the line to protect democratic values. She now travels the world speaking to organizations of all kinds on democracy, how to keep it, and freedom of the press.