Steven Dudley is the co-founder and co-director of InSight Crime, a think tank focused on organized crime in the Americas, and a senior fellow at American University’s Center for Latin American and Latino Studies in Washington, DC. In September, Dudley published his second book, MS-13: The Making of America’s Most Notorious Gang (HarperCollins), which in 2019 won the Lukas Prize for work-in-progress.

Dudley combines reporting from the ground with deep analysis. He has written for newspapers, magazines and think tanks. He has reported for weeklies and some of the largest news outlets in the world. And he has worked on government reports that inform future priority areas and country reports for asylum lawyers.

Dudley is the former Bureau Chief of the Miami Herald in the Andean Region and the author of Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia (Routledge 2004). Dudley has also reported from Haiti, Brazil, Nicaragua, Cuba and Miami for National Public Radio and the Washington Post, among others.

Dudley has a BA in Latin American History from Cornell University and an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He did the Knight Fellowship at Stanford University in 2007-2008, and is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. In 2012 to 2013, he was a visiting fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC where he currently resides.