Diana Jean Schemo
Executive Editor / Co-Founder
djschemo@100r.org
Diana Jean Schemo is the co-founder of 100Reporters and founder and co-director of Double Exposure, the United States’ only film festival and combined symposium dedicated to cinematic investigative storytelling. She is an author and award-winning veteran national and foreign correspondent, with more than 25 years at The New York Times and the Baltimore Sun. She has covered poverty and child abuse, religion and culture. The Times nominated her coverage of education for a Pulitzer Prize in 2003.
As bureau chief for The Times in Rio de Janeiro from 1995 to 1999, Schemo tracked the drug war in Colombia, and that country’s brutal conflict between leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitaries. Her stories chronicled the rise of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, counterfeiting in Paraguay, indentured servitude in Brazil, and journeys to the heartland of Brazil, where she wrote of previously uncontacted native tribes.
Before joining The Times, Schemo became the first woman assigned overseas for the Baltimore Sun, heading the paper’s West European bureau in Paris and, upon the fall of the Berlin Wall, opening a second bureau in Berlin. She covered the trial of Klaus Barbie, the infamous “Butcher of Lyon,” nuclear arms negotiations, the Kurdish exodus from Iraq following the first Gulf War, and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. She has reported from more than 25 countries and regions, from Somalia to Israel, Iraq to the Amazon. She is a three time winner of The Times Publisher’s Awards, and other prizes.
Schemo’s work has appeared in Ms., Marie Claire, New York and The New York Times magazines. She is the author of the 2010 book Skies to Conquer: A Year Inside the Air Force Academy (Wiley). The book tracks a year in the life of one squadron at a time of upheaval in the military’s youngest, if most controversial, service academy.
