Izabela Moi

Izabela Moi has been working as a journalist for more than 20 years covering mostly education, but also social issues intertwined with culture, diversity and public policy. In 2010, she started a project called Mural, an independent blog hosted at Folha – the largest newspaper in Brazil – where news was produced by 20 young journalists living in the underprivileged outskirts of São Paulo. In 2015, growing from a blog with many side projects and many more “local correspondents” participating as writers and reporters, it became the non-profit news organization the Agencia Mural de Jornalismo das Periferias, with almost 80 local correspondents. Its mission is to overcome the news gap for underserved communities, which means reporting and writing stories on about 85 percent of São Paulo’s population and publishing it through partnerships with mainstream news outlets. In 2014-15, Moi was a John S. Knight fellow in the Journalism Program on Leadership, Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Stanford. She has a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s in sociology. She has currently been nominated one of five finalists for a national prize for women, as one of the best independent journalists in the Brazil.