What has Viviana Hurtado not done? Well, a lot. She still wants to scale to the top of Macchu Pichu and read Neruda’s Canto General when the sun sets. She dreams of being a back-up singer/dancer to a great salsero (Oscar D’Leon, I’m avail). She hopes to graduate to headstand and complete a marathon--running. She will always go to battle when she feels a bully has picked on someone smaller.

In her never-ending quest to satisfy her curiosity, she’s done some cool things to indulge the nerd, the spitfire, and the dreamer within. As a scholarship kid, she earned a PHD from Yale, a Masters from Stanford, and a BA from Cal Berkeley. A little bit of a rolling stone, she’s lived in London, Madrid, Mexico City, Bogota, and equally as exotic Midland and Brownsville, Texas, and Providence, Rhode Island.

Her boundless passion led her from an academic career to journalism. For more than a decade, she has covered the top national and international events in a variety of media. Television? Check. Print? That too. Blogs? Um Hmm. Social media? But of course!

What hasn’t changed is the conviction and integrity with which Viviana tells stories: as the blogger behind The Wise Latina Club, she is inserting a MIA Hispanic female perspective on current events, trends, and pop culture; as a freelance writer for More Magazine, she has nailed coveted interviews with a Nobel Prize laureate and the nation’s first Latina governor; as a contributing Food Editor at the Washington Flyer Magazine, she covers food as a metaphor for this emerging cultural world capital; as a DC correspondent and sub-anchor for ABC News, she led coverage on the global economic crisis, technology, and politics. At Al Jazeera English, she reported extensively from Latin America. She freelanced for the New York Times in Mexico City, contributing to the newspaper’s award winning coverage of the historic 2000 Mexican presidential elections. Viviana worked her way up to the network level from her internship at CNN en Español and local news.

As for what she wants to do when she grows up, Viviana is taking suggestions.