Elizabeth Farnsworth joined the NewsHour as a contributing correspondent in 1984 and became chief correspondent and principal substitute anchor in 1995. She became a senior correspondent in October 1999 to concentrate primarily on covering foreign affairs and the arts from the NewsHour office in San Francisco. She left the full-time staff in 2004 but continues as a special correspondent, reporting from Latin America and the Middle East, among other places.

Farnsworth is CEO of West Wind Productions in San Francisco, California. Her latest project is a feature-length documentary, The Judge and the General, which she co-directed and produced with Patricio Lanfranco of Chile. The film grew out of NewsHour reporting and tells the story of the transformation of a conservative judge in Chile as he investigates the first charges of murder and torture against former dictator Augusto Pinochet. The documentary premiered at the 2008 San Francisco Film Festival and aired on the PBS series P.O.V. Honors for the film include an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award, an Emmy nomination, and a Director's Guild of America nomination for best documentary direction.

Farnsworth has covered international events on location for the NewsHour in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Vietnam, Cambodia, Haiti, Peru, Guatemala, Nicaragua Venezuela, Chile, Korea, and Japan, among other places. In 2001, she reported from Malawi and Botswana on the AIDS crisis in Africa in a special four-part series (produced by Joanne Elgart), which received the 2001 Silver World Medal from the New York Festivals and an Emmy nomination.

Other independent PBS documentaries produced by Farnsworth include Thanh's War and The Gospel and Guatemala. Her writings have appeared in Foreign Policy, World Policy Journal, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, and other publications. She graduated from Middlebury College in 1965, earned her master's in Latin American history from Stanford University, and lived in Peru and Chile for extended periods. She is married, has two children and four grandchildren.