Education
Cornell University; Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
Cornell University; Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
She"s cofounder of digital language learning Fluenz, where she leads the creation of all learning content. She is host and co-creator of Sonia"s Travels, which airs weekly on YouTube and Yahoo Screen. She also stars in the Ulive travel series Almost Free.
She was named the 4th most influential person in travel social media by travel blog Skift in May 2014.
Sonia Gil was born in Venezuela, in a multilingual family, grew up in Caracas and Boca Raton, Florida, and attended Cornell University where she studied plant genetics. After graduating, Gil went to the Amazon rainforest and worked with an non-governmental organization. Then she went to Paris and brushed up on her French.
After that, she traveled to China, where she encountered obstacles in the traditional way of learning the language. Gil’s next stop was China, and again she came back to the realization: Language couldn’t be taught the same way all over the world.
There needed to be a common ground between traditional instruction and modern presentation.
According to Joshua Cohen, Sonia started the vlog "Sonia"s Travels" after she began traveling extensively for her work with Fluenz, which "make the costs of producing Sonia’s Travels marginal instead of prohibitive". She partnered with Mariana Hellmund, who is an award winning filmmaker with an extensive career, and together they developed the visual style that characterizes the web series. Another one of her projects, non-profit Fluenz.org, distributes free English language programs for people in need.
More recently, she partnered with Lonely Planet to create FluentRoad.com, an online program for travelers interested in learning Travel Spanish.
Sonia also has her own video series "Almost Free" on Scripps Network"s Ulive.com.