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A Mass Media Ph.D. graduate from Michigan State University, Professor Ferreira is a specialist in the study of comparative communication law and ethics, Latin American media history, and multimedia uses for social development. He is also a researcher of ethnic minorities in the Americas, in particular indigenous populations.

A journalist from the Universidad Externado de Colombia with a J.D. degree granted by the Universidad Nacional de Colombia Law School, he became a Martin Luther King-César Chávez-Rosa Parks Doctoral Fellow in the State of Michigan. He is a regular contributor to the BBC World Service/BBC Mundo and is currently a consultant to UNESCO, the Organization of American States (OAS), CAF (Development Bank of Latin America), Freedom House, The U.S. Department of State, Bloomberg News, and the Grupo de Diarios América. He has also work with UNICEF, the Inter American Press Assocation (IAPA), the International Center for Higher Studies in Communication for Latin America (CIESPAL), Fleishman-Hillard, the Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (FNPI), and the Dominican Republic’s Office of the First Lady and the Global Foundation for Democracy and Development (FUNGLODE), among others.

Born in Bogota, Ferreira initiated his career as a field reporter in the daily newscast Noticiero TV Mundo-Channel 7. After nearly thirty years of an academic career in the United States, he has published works in Anglo and Latin American academic journals and encyclopedias. His book Centuries of silence: The story of Latin American journalism (Praeger, 2006) was a best-seller among libraries worldwide. Choice magazine of the Library of Congress called it: “Probably the most detailed account of the Latin American mass media ever written in English” (May 2007).

Dr. Ferreira’s second book, Frames of Freedom: Rules and jurisprudence in the Americas (1997-2012) will be published in early 2013. He is also working on a third book about the indigenous contribution to communication in America (Native Journalism Episodes: From Precolumbian to Contemporary Times).