She attended the University of Naples first and then of Salerno, where she graduated in philosophy with a thesis on state contributions to the south and the workers’ movement. She was a teacher at the Middle School of Teulada (in Sardinia) from 1972 to 1974. A professional journalist since 1976, United States correspondent first for Il Manifesto and then for La Repubblica for which from 1981 to 1988 she covered central and Latin America. Among the events she reported: the revolution in Nicaragua, the civil war in El Salvador, the American invasion of Grenada, the fall of the Baby Doc Duvalier regime in Haiti, and the earthquake in Mexico.

She became Middle East correspondent for La Repubblica based in Jerusalem. In 1977 when was 27 years old she worked at Il Manifesto. She moved to Corriere della Sera in 1993 and returned to the USA. During the course of 1995 she returned to Italy and started working in television, for RAI 3, on the programme Linea tre. From 1996 to 1998 she was director of Tg3. In 2000 she set up and ran the news agency APBiscom, a company formed by Associated Press and Ebiscom. On 13 March 2003 she became President of RAI, a post she held until 4 May 2004, the date of her resignation. She was the second woman to become president of RAI, after Letizia Moratti (in 1994).

Since 2004 she has been a columnist for La Stampa. The following year she returned to RAI to present the RAI 3 programme In ½ h, that airs in the early afternoon on Sunday and that consists of an interview with a personality discussing the week’s leading news topics. She is the director responsible for Aspenia, the magazine of the Aspen Institute Italia, of which she is a member of the executive. She has written the books: “Bassa intensità” Low Intensity (published by Feltrinelli) on Salvador; “La crepa” The Crack, on the landslide of Sarno in 1998 (pub. Rizzoli); “No”, against the second Iraq war (pub. Donzelli); and “1977” (pub. Einaudi) on the youth movement of 1977. She has received a number of awards for journalism, among them the Premiolino (the highest award in Italian journalism) and the Saint Vincent.

In 1993 she was the recipient of the “Nieman” scholarship from Harvard University. On 13 March 2006, on an edition of ‘In ½ h’ during the 2006 election campaign she was involved in an altercation with then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi that led to the former premier cancelling the programme. On 15 January 2009 she participated in the programme AnnoZero arguing with the presenter Michele Santoro, and accusing him of having created a programme that was too pro-Palestinian; following a heated discussion she stormed out of the studio after being reprimanded by Santoro who described her criticisms as “nonsense”.

From 28 March 2011 she hosted the RAI 3 programme ‘Potere’, a series of 6 broadcasts of one hour each. Married to the American journalist Daniel Williams, she has a daughter, Antonia. Lucia Annunziata is an atheist; on 23 February 2012, during an internet transmission of “Servizio Pubblico”, presented by Michele Santoro, Lucia Annunziata stated: “Adriano Celentano has the right to say what he wants, and I would have defended him even if he had said that gays should be sent to an extermination camp.” Since September 2012 she has been director of Huffington Post Italia. Since January 2013 she has been presenting a new television programme, Leader.