Sylvia Poggioli

7th Annual John S. Knight Lecturer

Sylvia Poggioli was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the daughter of Italian anti-fascists who fled Italy in the Mussolini era. She grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has a B.A. degree in Romance languages and literatures from Harvard. She studied at Rome University on a Fulbright Scholarship.

She was actively involved with women's film and theater groups, and worked at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy.

She began her journalism career in Rome with the English language service of the Ansa news agency in Italy, where she was an editor from 1971 to 1986.

Poggioli in 1982 began reporting for National Public Radio, where she has gained fame and an enthusiastic listening audience as a result of her reports from many European countries, and for her courageous and insightful coverage of the war in Bosnia.

In early 1991, she helped supplement NPR's Gulf War coverage, reporting from London on the European reaction to events surrounding the war. That NPR team won the Dupont-Columbia Award.

In 1993, she was awarded the Edward Weintal Prize for diplomatic reporting and the George Foster Peabody Award, both for her coverage of the war in Bosnia.

In 1994, Ms. Poggioli received the National Women's Political Caucus/Radcliffe College Award for her broadcast entitled "War in Bosnia: Women's Bodies Used as Battlefields," and the Excellence in Media Silver Angel Award for the piece entitled "Religious Tour of Sarajevo." She was also elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

She spent the 1990 academic year as a research fellow at Harvard University's Center for Press, Politics, and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government.

She is based in Rome.