Juliana Barbassa was born in Brazil, but she had a nomadic life between her home country and Iraq, Malta, Libya, Spain, and France before settling in the United States. Barbassa began her career with the Dallas Observer, where she won a Katie Journalism Award in 1999. She joined the Associated Press in 2003, and after two more awards from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the APME, she returned to Brazil in 2010 as the AP’s Rio de Janeiro correspondent. Her debut book is Dancing with the Devil in the City of God: Rio de Janeiro on the Brink (Touchstone) a deeply reported and beautifully written biography of the seductive and chaotic city of Rio de Janeiro.
