Karla Mendes

Karla Mendes is an award-winning Brazilian journalist working as a Rio de Janeiro-based investigative and feature reporter for Mongabay and a member of the Pulitzer Center's Rainforest Investigations Network. She is the first Brazilian to win the Oakes Award (2025) and the first Latin American to be elected to the board of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), where she was also nominated Vice President for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Throughout her career, Mendes has won several national and international awards, including the SEAL Journalism Environmental Award with distinction for her “powerful work covering the continued encroachment of global corporations into Indigenous Amazon lands,” two SEJ awards, the Fetisov Journalism Award, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Award, Brazil's Federal Prosecutors Association Award, among others. Karla has been working as a correspondent for international outlets since 2015 and she specialized in covering environmental, land and property rights issues since 2017, when she worked as a land and property rights correspondent for the Thomson Reuters Foundation between August 2017 and December 2018. Prior to that, Karla was a business reporter for over 10 years in Rio, Madrid, Brasilia and Belo Horizonte, including with newspapers O Globo, O Estado de S. Paulo, Expansión and news agency S&P Global Market Intelligence. Karla has a Master in Investigative and Data Journalism from the University of King’s College, Canada, and an MBA in finance from São Paulo’s Fundação Instituto de Administração (FIA). She is fluent in English, Spanish and Portuguese.