Samantha Schmidt is The Washington Post's Bogotá bureau chief, covering all of Spanish-speaking South America. She previously covered gender and family issues for The Washington Post. In the past two years as a foreign correspondent in Latin America, she has reported from Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Brazil and her mother's home country of Costa Rica. In late 2022, she spent a month in Ukraine, reporting on the early days of the liberation of Kherson city and the people and soldiers near the Zaporizhzhia region's front lines. She told the story of the brief life of baby Serhii, the two-day old infant killed in the maternity ward where he was born. She spoke to the family of a woman killed while fleeing Russian-occupied territory across the Dnipro River by boat. She wrote about the remarkable Orikhiv mayor spending her days in a bunker under a bombed-out city hall, doing her best to keep her war-torn town alive. She returned to Ukraine this May, and spent a month helping lead the Washington Post's coverage of the first days of the counter-offensive, the relentess air strikes on Kyiv and the devastating collapse of the Kakhovka dam. Honors and Awards: National Headliner Award, first place for news series, 2020 ; NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists, Excellence in Long Form Journalism Award, 2020 Professional Affiliations: National Association of Hispanic Journalists
IWMF Awards
- Courage in Journalism Awards , 2023