Graciela Levi Castillo
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Graciela Levi Castillo (4 September 1926 – 8 October 2014) was an Ecuadorian journalist and writer.[1]
Graciela Levi Castillo was born in Guayaquil in 1926. She was the daughter of Roberto Levi Hoffman, a Sephardic Jewish chemist who had immigrated from Germany, and María Piedad Castillo de Levi, a prominent Ecuadorian writer and feminist.[1]
She studied journalism at Columbia University in New York and both communications and international relations at the University of Guayaquil, where she received a master's degree in international diplomacy.[1]
Levi Castillo was Ecuador's first national director of tourism. She also acted as a representative of Ecuador and of the Guayaquil Chamber of Industries in various meetings of the Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries.[2]
In her work as a journalist, Levi Castillo interviewed a wide variety of high-profile international figures, including the politicians Eva Perón, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Gamal Abdel Nasser; the writers Jean Cocteau and Ernest Hemingway; the painters Pablo Picasso and Max Ernst; and the performers Frank Sinatra and Sofia Loren.[3][4] She had a special audience with Pope Pius XII and reported exclusively on the canonization of the first Ecuadorian saint, Mariana de Jesús.[3]
Levi Castillo worked in journalism her whole life, including for the publication El Telégrafo, as well as other Ecuadorian and international magazines and newspapers. She was named as a correspondent for the Associated Press, ABC in Madrid, La Prensa in Buenos Aires, Excélsior in Mexico, and El Universal in Caracas.[4] She was also a member of the Casa de la Cultura in Guayas and of various professional organizations for Ecuadorian journalists.[1]