Sonya Laurence Green is currently a Supervisory Assignments Editor in the VOA News Center in Washington DC. Prior to that, she served as Chief of VOA’s English to Africa multimedia news service, where she managed a team of 48 reporters, editors, and producers creating radio, television, and digital news, features, and entertainment for an audience of 25 million people in Africa.

She founded VOA’s South Sudan Radio Project. Green worked in Africa for 15 years, eight of which were spent reporting from VOA’s East Africa bureau, based in Nairobi, Kenya. Green has covered famine and U.N. intervention in Somalia; genocide in Rwanda; civil conflict in Sudan, Burundi, and Zaire; as well as the push for democratic transition in East, Central and Southern Africa. Green has also worked as a spokeswoman for the United Nations in Somalia, and as the Africa Information Officer for USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance.

Before moving to Africa, Green worked in New York City for a documentary film and television company, producing materials for public television. Green attended Harvard University, where she served as an editor at the daily Harvard Crimson student newspaper. She then attended the University of Nairobi, where she earned a graduate degree in journalism.

Favorite SFS Memory: While working in the field with the archaeology students at Kichpanha, Belize, we discovered the oldest known (at the time) Mayan glyph writing, etched on a petrified bone, from the pre-Classic period. Years later, at the natural history museum in Vienna, Austria, I saw it in a traveling exhibit about the Maya culture. Our bone! That was thrilling.