Juanita Leon is the director of La Silla Vacía, a Colombian online-only newspaper. She studied law at the University of the Andes and has a Masters in Journalism from Columbia University. After working at The Wall Street Journal Americas in New York, she returned to Colombia to El Tiempo daily, where she worked as an editor of the paper's Peace Unit covering the peace process with the FARC.

She was editor at SEMANA magazine in 2006, and helped create the daily edition Semana.com. After a year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard she led the launch of Flypmedia.com magazine in New York. She returned to Colombia and with funding from the Open Society Institute she began working on La Silla Vacía.