Who is Catarina

Catarina Fernandes Martins is a reporter, screenwriter, and multimedia producer. Over the last decade, she has been traveling the world as a freelance foreign correspondent, reporting from Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Belgium, Poland, Germany, the Balkans, the UK, the US, Israel, Palestine, Turkey, Egypt and El Salvador.

She has covered the Greek debt crisis and the refugee crisis in the Balkans. She has reported on Brexit and written about women rights and miners in El Salvador and Bedouins in Palestine. She filed from Catalonia during the suspended declaration of independence and reported about migration in Italy, in Egypt, and in Turkey. She has reported extensively on Portugal’s drug policy.

She has also been working as a screenwriter for documentaries and TV shows worldwide.

Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, NPR’s Rough Translation podcast, Articulate, PBS’s Emmy award-winning show, In Real Life, Scripps News’ Emmy Award-winning documentary series, The Guardian, The Christian Science Monitor, PRI’s The World, WNYC, WGBH, Foreign Policy, World Policy Journal, The Boston Globe, Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera America, ARTE’s 24H Europe, RTP, Expresso, PÚBLICO, Diário de Notícias, Notícias Magazine, VISÃO, Humanista (Amnesty International Portugal), Rádio Renascença, TSF.

She is one of the co-producers of the documentary From Devil’s Breath, directed by Academy award-winner Orlando von Einsiedel, and produced by Leonardo DiCaprio. The film is part of Trevor Noah’s The Tipping Point series. 

Catarina is one of the screenwriters responsible for the in depth award-winning documentary series Europa 30, about the history of Portugal’s integration into the European Union.

She is part of the team that wrote Planeta A, a 9 episodes documentary series about sustainability co-produced by RTP, and the Gulbenkian Foundation. In 2022, Planeta A was nominated for the Prix Europa award in the category of TV Documentary Series.

In 2022, Catarina was part of the Project Oasis team, a research study on the sustainability of digital native media in more than 40 countries in Europe by the nonprofit SembraMedia.

She worked in Manthia Diawara’s latest film – Angela Davis: A World of Greater Freedom.

In 2013, Catarina won Portugal’s highest honor for young journalist of the year. She was a finalist for the European Journalist Awards on Diversity in 2016; she won Prémio Fernando de Sousa in 2017 and was part of the team that won that same award in 2018. She was the recipient of a Gulbenkian Grant for Investigative Journalism in 2019. Catarina is an International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) fellow. In 2023, the episode she worked on for NPR’s Rough Translation podcast, Stuck@Work: Your Country’s Brand Is Escape, But You Can’t, won a Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists in the US. In 2024, a Washington Post series she worked on – Dying Early: America’s Life Expectancy Crisis – won first place in the National Headliner Award category for News Series in Daily Newspapers  as well as an Online Journalism Award (the University of Florida Award in Investigative Data Journalism).

Catarina conceptualized and led a highly successful international journalism conference held in Lisbon in 2013. More than 300 attendants came from all over Portugal to hear speakers from The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Atavist, El País, among others. In 2017, she was the co-organizer of Well Told, UK’s first conference in narrative and longform journalism held in London.

Catarina is trained as a radio producer by the Transom Story Workshop where she studied under Rob Rosenthal, considered the best radio teacher in the U.S., Ira Glass, and Deborah Amos.