Maria Martha Bruno de Arruda

Maria Martha Bruno is a multimedia journalist for 25 years. She has worked for Brazilian, US, UK, and Argentinian media and is now the international partnerships coordinator at Agencia Publica, the largest nonprofit newsroom in Brazil and the main investigative news agency in the country. At Publica, she has just co-ran a campaign that helped to reveal details of Elon Musk’s businesses in the Brazilian Amazon. 

In 2023, Maria Martha and Gênero e Número (Gender & Number), the data-driven journalism organization she was co-running since 2020, won the most important data journalism award in Brazil, with the dataviz story “A Waterfall of White Men,” on the predominance of the segment in the Brazilian Supreme Court for over 100 years. 

Previously, between 2014 and 2020, she has worked as a TV producer for NBC News, mostly for NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, and for Al Jazeera, BBC and CNN. For these outlets, Maria Martha reported and produced stories on the 2014 FIFA World Cup, the 2016 Summer Olympics, and the impeachment process of the first female Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, among other storylines. Her Linked In profile features some of her most important stories for TV. 

From 2017 to 2022, she has also worked as a freelance political analyst for Argentine broadcast channels. Previously, from 2012 to 2014, she was an international correspondent in Buenos Aires for UOL, Brazil’s largest news portal. Maria Martha holds a bachelor and a master's degree in Journalism and Communication from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, the largest federal university in the country and one of Brazil’s centers of excellence in teaching and research. 

Since 2022, Maria Martha is a graduate student and a teaching assistant at Texas A&M University where she particularly enjoys her students’ engagement and participation in her classes.  

Courses Taught

• COMM 203
• COMM 215