Maria Ressa earned a bachelor's degree in English from Princeton University, graduating with honors. She was then awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines in 1986, where she attended graduate school at the University of the Philippines.
Before joining CNN, Ressa was vice president of a post-production company in Manila, where she produced weekly public affairs programs for Philippine television.
Maria Ressa is currently CNN's Jakarta bureau chief. She has traveled and reported extensively in Asia, including China, Japan, South Korea and India — and was CNN's lead reporter on three tumultuous changes of governments in Southeast Asia: in Indonesia in 1998, in East Timor in 1999 and finally in the Philippines in 2001.
Among the awards she has received are the National Headliner Award for Investigative Journalism in 2002, the SAIS-Novartis International Journalism Award in 2000 for her work in East Timor, the Asian Television Awards in 1999 for Indonesia and the Ferris Professorship of Journalism at Princeton University for 2001.
Ressa was in residence at Princeton University for the spring semester 2001, where she taught a course she designed on Politics and the Press in Southeast Asia.
