She was born in the family of architects Max and Clea Sterenberg. Her father, Max, was born into a family of emigrants from Bessarabia in the 1930s. Leila became a journalist in the early 1990s and lived for two years in New York, where she worked as a freelance reporter for the Brazilian print press before to be hired by Bloomberg to do radio and television broadcasts, being the first native Portuguese speaker. In Brazil, she joined Globo Corporation, the largest media group in the coun try. For two years, she was editor-in-chief and anchor of local news. Until 2000, she worked at GloboNews. She has hosted several shows, such as the Clube dos Correspondentes (Correspondents' Club), a talk show with foreign journalists based in Brazil. She has also developed numerous special projects, including Um Seculo de Arquitetura (A Century of Architecture, which celebrates the 100th anniversary of Oscar Niemeyer's birth in 2007), Alem da Guerra (Beyond the War, a series of inter- views with Holocaust survivors who settled in Brazil) and the Expedição Namibia (the Namibian Expedition, about the first genocide of the twentieth century). Her project, Cartas da Bessarabia (Letters from Bessarabia, produced by Globo's Philos.tv, a video on demand) is her first documentary about the lives of people who emigrated from Bessarabia to Brazil.