What I Do

I'm a Brazilian Journalist with over 20 years of experience reporting on my country. After almost 10 years as BBC correspondent in Rio, I now work as a freelancer covering Brazil for some of the world's leading media  companies, like NPR, BBC News and NatGeo. As a bilingual, multimedia reporter, I move smoothly between writing (print & digital) and broadcasting (TV & radio); and between Portuguese and English. I'm a people person and a nature person, and am passionate about environmental and human interest stories.

Júlia Dias Carneiro

Freelance Journalist in Rio



Featured Articles

Explore a featured selection of my reporting below.

Brazilian dance craze created by young people in Rio’s favelas is declared cultural heritage

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — It all started with nifty leg movements, strong steps backwards and forwards, paced to Brazilian funk music. Then it adopted moves from break dancing, samba, capoeira, frevo — whatever was around. The passinho, a dance style created in the 2000s by kids in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, was declared in March to be an “intangible cultural heritage” by legislators in the state of Rio, bringing recognition to a cultural expression born in the sprawling working-class neighborhoods.Th...

Brazil dam burst: Six months on, the marks left by sea of sludge

Six months ago, the collapse of a mining dam near the city of Mariana, in the state of Minas Gerais, released a torrent of sludge that killed 19 people, wiped out villages and became the worst environmental disaster in Brazilian history. The deluge travelled more than 600km (370 miles) before spilling into the Atlantic, leaving a trail of destruction along the Doce River that interrupted water supply in dozens of cities along its course. The iron ore mine was run by Samarco, a joint-venture betw...

Featured TV & Video Work