Director

Teresa Puente is an associate professor of journalism at Columbia College Chicago. She joined the faculty in the fall of 2006 and served as the coordinator of the News Reporting and Writing concentration. She has taught a variety of courses from Reporting and Writing II to Multimedia Feature Writing and The World of Ethnic Media. In the fall of 2011, she was a visiting professor in New York at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. There she taught Social Media Skills for Journalists and Covering Immigration courses.

Puente also is the founder of Latina Voices (funded with a grant from J-Lab and the McCormick Foundation) and writes an independent blog for Chicago Now (Chicago Tribune Media Co.) called Chicanísima.

Puente was previously a reporter at the Chicago Tribune and also was a member of the Chicago Sun-Times editorial board and wrote a column for the op-ed section. Puente also has worked for dailies in southern California and for Hispanic Link News Service in Washington, D.C.

She also is the recipient of the Studs Terkel Award from the Community Media Workshop for her coverage of Chicago’s diverse communities. She has been a journalist for more than 20 years and in that time has written extensively about immigration and the Latino community in the United States.

“When I found JAWS, I found a family in journalism. The founding members of JAWS are women who broke ground decades before I entered the field. If it were not for them, a Latina woman like myself would not have found a career in journalism. JAWS has given me new friends and also mentors that have encouraged me to continue to grow and excel in journalism.”