Michèle Montas

Recent Speaking Engagements:
Haiti's Electoral Aftermath: What Comes Next? at Georgetown University Caribbean Project, Haiti Study Group, December 7, 2000

Michèle Montas is Editor-in-Chief at Radio Haiti Internationale. Since her husband Jean Dominique's assassination on April 3rd of this year, she has been heading the station with Gigi Dominique, Jean's daughter, the Executive Director of Radio Haiti. She continues to anchor the one-and-a-half-hour newscast that she had been co-anchoring with her husband since 1986.

A graduate of the University of Maine in journalism and political affairs and of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism (Class of 1969), Michèle first worked as a reporter in Port-au-Prince for a daily paper, Le Nouvelliste, and later as Chief Editor of a cultural magazine "Conjonction". She also worked at Radio Haiti as news editor and anchorperson from 1973-1980.

On November 28, 1980, after serving for nearly a decade as a voice of empowerment for the Haitian people, Radio Haiti was ransacked by the political police and the army. Michèle was jailed along with other journalists and human rights advocates and later expelled to New York where she was joined by her husband, Jean. Both received political asylum in the US. During the next six years and for another exile season in 1991-1994, she worked as a radio producer and press officer for the United Nations. After her exile, Michèle returned to Haiti with Jean and has been Editor-in-Chief at Radio Haiti ever since, heading a newsroom of 25 journalists. With her husband no longer at her side, she now courageously continues their work of promoting democracy and human rights in Haiti.