Jon Williams is the Managing Director of RTE News – Ireland’s national broadcaster. Jon moved to Dublin in January after 4 years as Managing Editor of ABC News, based in New York. From 2006-13, he was the BBC’s World News Editor, leading the coverage of the wars in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon, as well as the Haiti and Sichuan earthquakes.

Monique Villa is CEO of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, and Founder of TrustLaw and Trust Conference. She has been ranked among the world’s 100 most influential people in Business Ethics by Ethisphere, and in 2015 won the International Center for Research on Women Champions for Change Award for her vision and effort in the fight against slavery.

Steven Erlanger is London Bureau Chief of The New York Times since August 2013. He has been bureau chief previously in Paris, Jerusalem, Berlin, Prague, Belgrade, Moscow and Bangkok. He was chief diplomatic correspondent in Washington and Culture Editor in New York. Before joining The Times, he was European correspondent for The Boston Globe, based in London, from 1983-87.

Melanie Iredale is Deputy Director of Sheffield Doc/Fest – a world leading and the UK’s premier documentary festival, celebrating the art and business of factual storytelling. Melanie works across all of the Festival programmes: Film Programme, Alternate Realities, Talks & Sessions, and Marketplace & Training. Her background is in curating, commissioning for, and producing film festivals across the North of England.

Lindsey Hilsum is Channel 4 News’ International Editor and the author of ‘Sandstorm; Libya in the Time of Revolution’. In recent years she has covered conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Ukraine, terror attacks in Europe and the journeys of refugees. Previously she reported the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as reporting from Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, Iran, Zimbabwe and China.

Hugo Ward is currently Executive Producer at Economist Films, the newly created film arm of The Economist. Last year he was Series Editor of Channel 4’s multi-award winning foreign affairs strand Unreported World. Prior to this he spent a decade producing and directing documentaries and TV series for networks including Channel 4, Discovery and Sky. A journalist by trade, Hugo began his career as a BBC News trainee. He went on to work in newsrooms for the BBC, Sky, Channel 5 and Network Ten (Australia).

Kate Beal is CEO of Woodcut Media and the driving force behind one of the UK’s fastest growing independent production companies specialising in a broad range of factual entertainment that covers premium docs, History, True Crime and more. A former ITV producer, with a career that spans 22 years, Kate also champions diversity and equality within the work environment.

Kavita Puri is the Editor of the award-winning foreign affairs documentary strand Our World. She has commissioned notable programmes including Starving Yemen and The Killing of Farkhunda. She is also the presenter of the acclaimed Radio 4 series Three Pounds in My Pocket and was Journalist of the Year at the Asian Media Awards 2015. Previously Kavita worked at Newsnight.

Neil Breakwell is the London Bureau Chief of VICE News. Breakwell has worked in news and current affairs for over a decade. His experience spans the breadth of BBC programming from Radio 4, Today, The World at One and PM, to Deputy Editor at Newsnight. Since joining VICE News, he has worked with a growing team on original, multi-platform content for VICENews.com and VICE News Tonight. 

Shanida Scotland is Development Editor for BBC Storyville, and works across the Factual Acquisitions slate placing factual programming throughout the BBC. Shanida’s writing has appeared in The Quietus and BBC Online, and she has been a jury member at festivals including IDFA, True/False, BFI London Film Festival and CineGlobe in CERN. Her current postgraduate research explores the intersection between digital spaces, documentary storytelling and public broadcasting institutions.

Eleanor McDowall is a senior producer at Falling Tree Productions and the series producer of BBC Radio 4’s Short Cuts. Her documentary work has been broadcast across the BBC as well as on This American Life, CBC Doc Project, and UnFictional (KCRW). In her spare time, she runs Radio Atlas – an English-language home for subtitled audio from around the world.

Laura Parfitt is the Director of White Pebble Media. She is a multi award-winning radio producer and editor working in speech radio. Her company specialised in crafted documentaries for BBC Radio. She created the long running BBC Radio 4 series ‘Jon Ronson On…’ with journalist Jon Ronson. Laura is currently working as a composer, songwriter, conductor and music educationalist.

Eleanor Nichol is an anti-corruption campaigner and investigator with a track-record in building teams to achieve change. As a campaign leader at Global Witness, she has developed and headed work on corruption and natural resources in Africa and Asia for the past ten years. Closer to home, her most recent work exposed the UK property market as a magnet for dirty money. In response, the UK government has committed to legislation to tackle the problem.

Gladwell Otieno is the Executive Director of the Africa Centre for Open Governance (AfriCOG), a Kenyan civil society organisation, and the Vice Chairperson of the Board of Trustees of the African Leadership Centre. She is a member of the UN Convention against Corruption Coalition coordination committee and a leading member of the Kenyans for Peace with Truth and Justice coalition on accountability for political violence and human rights abuses.

Stephen Grey is a special correspondent for Reuters, based in London. A former foreign correspondent and investigations editor of the Sunday Times of London, he has worked as an investigative journalist for Reuters for the past 5 years, and has previously reported for the The Guardian, the New York Times, PBS Frontline, BBC Newsnight and Channel 4. 

Liz Mermin is the Director of Visual at the Thomson Reuters Foundation, where she oversees a team making short creative documentaries telling under-reported global humanitarian stories. These have included collaborations with The Guardian, TIME Magazine and Participant Media. Liz has directed seven documentary features that have been released in cinemas and broadcast internationally; and numerous shorts, including a 20-part web-series inside CERN.

Maziar Bahari is an Iranian Canadian journalist and filmmaker. He has produced a number of documentaries and news reports for broadcasters around the world including BBC, Channel4, HBO, Discovery, Canal+ and NHK. During the 2009 Iranian Election Protests he was arrested without charge, and detained for 118 days. His memoir, ‘Then They Came for Me’ (re-released as Rosewater), was published by Random House in June 2011.

Kim Sengupta is the Defence and Diplomatic Editor of The Independent. He has covered stories nationally and internationally over many years including conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Israel/Palestine, Libya, the Balkans, Egypt, Tunisia, Somalia, Darfur, Mali, Sierra Leone, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, Georgia and Northern Ireland. He has also written about non-conflict topics, social and political, elsewhere in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa.

Henna Zemurd-Butt runs Media Diversified, a social enterprise working to enrich the UK’s media landscape through a progressive digital platform featuring compelling stories, incisive analysis and groundbreaking art from creators living in diaspora. She is also co-founder of London-based literature festival, Bare Lit. Henna is an experienced creative, writer and editor with a background in the restaurant industry.

Cassie Werber is a reporter for Quartz in London, covering the evolution of human relationships. She also co-runs Hacks Hackers London, the city’s most vibrant meet-up for journalists and technologists. Previously, Cassie covered renewable energy and climate change for Quartz. She was an energy reporter at The Wall Street Journal in London, and an online editor at Financial News.

Lanre Akinola is the Editor of African Business, IC Publications. He is the former Editor of This Is Africa at the Financial Times and a non-executive director at the UK’s Business Council for Africa. Lanre has worked with the Bloomberg Media Initiative Africa and is a 2014 Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellow.

Stuart McGurk is the Senior Commissioning Editor of GQ magazine, looking after celebrity cover stories and long-form features content. He has profiled the likes of Chris Pratt, Eddie Redmayne, Matthew McConaughey and Charlie Kaufman, and written features on subjects ranging from Syrian refugee camps to late-night TV shows, from virtual currency bitcoin to the Hatton Garden diamond heist.

Ramita Navai is an Emmy award-winning foreign affairs journalist. She has reported from over 35 countries, made 20 documentaries for Unreported World and is the former Tehran correspondent for The Times. Her first book ‘City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death and the Search for Truth in Tehran’ won the Debut Political Book of the Year Award and Jerwood Award.

Louis Jebb is founder and CEO of immersiv.ly, a pioneering company in the production of news content in virtual reality since 2014. Jebb is an ambassador for Journalism 360, an initiative to share knowledge and best practices in immersive journalism backed by Google News Lab, Knight Foundation and the Online News Association.

Mohamed Yehia is the Head of Multimedia Output at BBC Arabic. He leads the BBC Arabic Service’s newsroom output on Radio, TV and Online. He started his journalism career in 1990 and worked in print, radio, TV newsgathering and output as well as on digital platforms. As a reporter and producer, Mohamed covered stories in over 15 countries across the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans.

Kurt Barling is a Professor of Journalism at Middlesex University. He is an award-winning investigative journalist and documentary-maker, covering alternative narratives in the mainstream media. He worked across News and Current Affairs for 25 years from Assignment and The Money Programme to Today and Newsnight, and he was the Special Correspondent for BBC London News from 2001-2014.

Natalie Fay is the Executive Producer of The Tonight programme and On Assignment strand at ITN. She has been overseeing On Assignment, a monthly current affairs series for ITV, since it started in 2014. Around the same time, she was also promoted to Executive Producer of the Tonight programmes. Natalie works with her small but brilliant team and plays a fundamental role producing content with top ITV correspondents around the world.

Donal MacIntyre is an award-winning investigative journalist, specialising in hard-hitting investigations, undercover operations and television exposés. He has won praise for his courage, and campaigning zeal particularly his consistent work in the area of care homes for the elderly and the learning disabled. He has written for The Guardian, The Mail and New Statesman, and has hosted programmes on Channel Five, ITV and the BBC.

Peter Bouckaert is Human Rights Watch’s Emergencies Director and an expert in humanitarian crises. Bouckaert is a veteran of fact-finding missions, and has testified about war crimes before the US Senate, Council of Europe, and the Yugoslav Tribunal in The Hague. Most recently, he has been working on the Mediterranean Refugee crisis, conducting investigations into human rights abuses by European border controls and difficulties faced by refugees on their journey. 

Dr. Katharine Jones is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations at Coventry University, and Trustee of Scottish Refugee Council. She has more than 17 years’ experience of conducting migration research for international organisations, governments and voluntary sector organisations. Her research is inspired by the need to promote the rights of people who migrate, whether for employment or because they have been forced to flee.

Jamal Osman is a London-based award-winning journalist and filmmaker specialising in Africa. He has produced/reported for Channel 4, the Guardian and Al Jazeera English. Jamal has won several awards including the Royal Television Society Independent Award 2012, Amnesty International Gaby Rado Memorial Award 2010, News Story of the Year Prize at the Foreign Press Association Awards 2009; and Kingston University News Reporter of the Year 2009.

Eyob Teklay Ghilazghy is the co-founder and Executive Director of Africa Monitors, a human rights organization based in Uganda. Eyob fled persecution in Eritrea and lives in exile in Uganda. He also co-founded and is the secretary of Pen Eritrea in exile. He is currently a resident writer with English PEN, working on a report on the situation of freedom of expression in Eritrea.

Benjamin Zand is a British-Iranian journalist and filmmaker, who shoots, edits, presents and produces much of his own work. He is currently the editor of BBC Pop Up, the BBC’s only mobile bureau that produces short docs in addition to a 30-minute documentary for every location they cover. He won the Royal Television Society award for Young Talent of the Year in 2016.

Jackie Murphy has worked as Senior Acquisitions Producer for Al Jazeera English since 2011. She has acquired a range of outstanding documentaries for the Witness strand, working with distributors, independent producers and young filmmakers around the globe. Jackie previously worked for leading UK production companies on current affairs and historical programmes and has worked at the BBC and ARTE in France.

Stella Paul is an independent journalist, covering environment and development issues across South Asia. She has received several international awards including the 2016 IWMF Courage in Journalism Award and the Asian Environmental Journalism Awards in 2015, 2014 and 2013. In 2015 Women Deliver named her as one of the “world’s 14 most powerful writers on women’s and girls’ issues worldwide”.

Tazeen Ahmad is an award-winning TV reporter, presenter and writer. Over the past 20 years, she has worked at a senior level across all the major broadcasters including ITN, NBC, BBC and Channel 4. An investigative reporter, a former foreign-correspondent and author of ‘The Check-out Girl’, published by Harper Collins, she also works as a leadership consultant.

Funmi Iyanda is an award-winning producer, broadcaster and writer. She’s Executive Director at OYA Media London and co-founder of Creation TV. She broke several barriers within the Nigerian Television Industry as a pioneer to produce and present Nigeria’s most famous TV talk show. She has since produced award winning TV shows and documentaries, and launched the How to Fix Nigeria project in collaboration with the Royal African Society.

Vin Ray is a writer, broadcaster and media consultant. He left the BBC in 2010 after a 23-year spell in which he had been Foreign Editor, Executive Editor, the first Director of the BBC College of Journalism and, for five years, a member of the BBC’s Journalism Board. He is Visiting Professor of Journalism at the Bournemouth University Media School, and director and trustee of the charity, Ockenden International.

Jenny Horwell joined DocHouse in 2012 as a producer, organising weekly documentary screenings. In 2015 the organisation opened Bertha DocHouse, the documentary cinema based at the Curzon Bloomsbury. Jenny has also programmed the documentary shorts for the last five editions of the London Short Film Festival. Before that, she spent several years working at film festivals and events, and produced promos, trailers and videos at Matter Productions.

Elhum Shakerifar is a BAFTA nominated producer currently working on films in Japan, Nepal and Syria with partners including BFI, BBC, Sundance and The New York Times. Her recent production A Syrian Love Story (Sean McAllister, 2015) was Guardian’s #3 Best Film of 2015 and is part of the 2016 LUX Prize. Elhum is also MENA programme advisor for London Film Festival.

David Cornwall is the Managing Director of Scorpion TV, an international production and distribution company dedicated to the worldwide sales of award-winning documentaries, films and television shows. Working closely with the independent film and television community, the productions represented by Scorpion are creative and often critically acclaimed.

Katie Metcalfe joined global video platform NOWNESS as a Video Commissioner in 2016, and has been a Shorts Programmer for Sundance Film Festival since 2010. She previously worked with Vimeo, helping launch their Festival & Awards in New York. She has also produced and project managed experiential live events for Secret Cinema and Punchdrunk. She is on the board of the Scottish Documentary Institute.

May Abdalla is one half of Anagram – an award winning interactive experience production team – that works with documentary material and physical experience to make visceral compelling stories that give an insight into what it means to be alive today. 

Alice Fishburn is the editor of the award-winning FT Weekend Magazine. Prior to joining the Financial Times in 2010, she worked for The Times in the newsroom and on the comment desk. She has also worked for Newsweek.  

Gemma Atkinson is an award-winning producer and director, making documentaries through her company Fat Rat Films. Her films screen at festivals internationally (AFI Silverdocs, LSFF, Sheffield Doc/Fest) are broadcast on BBC, C4, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, The New York Times and garner national press coverage. She is a founder of Doc Heads, a screening and networking event that champions short documentary.

Pip Clothier has a 30 year career in making investigative and undercover programmes for TV networks. He worked for World In Action for seven years and at BBC Docs for ten years, on shows such as MacIntyre Undercover, and series produced Whistleblower. Since starting Snapper TV in 2008 he’s uncovered corruption at the heart of Westminster, making the renowned C4 show “Politicians For Hire” and BBC TVs “Undercover Cash For Questions.”

Sue Turton has been a TV reporter for 27 years, and has now diversified into documentaries and writing. She covered conflict for Al Jazeera in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq and Egypt where she and her colleagues were convicted on terrorism charges. Sue began at Sky News, and after reporting for ITV and GMTV she moved to Channel 4 for 12 years, winning two RTS awards.

Daniel Pearl has commissioned, edited and produced some of the country’s highest profile news and current affairs programmes. He is currently Deputy Head, News & Current Affairs at Channel 4 where he is a Commissioning Editor of Channel 4 News as well as Editor of the multi-award winning Dispatches strand. Previously Daniel worked at the BBC, and was Deputy Editor at Panorama and the BBC’s Six and Ten O’Clock News.

Jane Ferguson has edited the Observer New Review since 2005. She was previously the paper’s Arts Editor, a role she also held at the London Evening Standard. Jane has written widely across the industry, including for the Sunday Telegraph and Time Out.

Nadene Ghouri is a multi-award winning journalist specialising in human interest and human rights issues. She is a former correspondent of the BBC and Al Jazeera English, and today is a freelance broadcaster and reporter working for BBC current affairs, and leading publications including The Guardian and Mail on Sunday. She is the co-author of two New York Times bestsellers ‘The Favoured Daughter’ and ‘Born Into The Children of God’.

Maria Teresa Ronderos is a Colombian journalist, and the director of the Open Society Program on Independent Journalism, where she oversees efforts to promote viable, high-quality media, particularly in countries transitioning to democracy. Before OSF, Maria worked for Semana, Colombia’s leading news magazine, in a range of senior editorial roles. Maria has trained professional journalists from across Latin America, and is the creator and editor-in-chief of VerdadAbierta.com, covering armed conflict in Colombia.

Michael Goldfarb is a veteran radio journalist. Over 25 years he has reported on culture, conflicts and conflict resolution in more than 20 countries on five continents.  He has won honours on both sides of the Atlantic including a Sony Award and Dupont Columbia Award. He currently makes documentaries for BBC Radio and presents the FRDH podcast.

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Journalist and documentary filmmaker Milène Larsson has made award-winning films covering civil rights, social uprisings and migration, and investigates gender norms and women’s social status around the world for VICE’s women’s interest channel Broadly. She has appeared on HBO, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, MSNBC and Sky News and given a TEDx talk about what borders are doing to our common humanity.

Hillary Margolis is a researcher in the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch, where her work focuses on violence against women and girls. Most recently, she has conducted research on refugees and asylum-seekers arriving in Italy via Libya, and on sexual violence by armed groups in the Central African Republic conflict. Previously, Hillary led programs in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and in a refugee camp in eastern Chad.

Dick Fontaine is a documentary filmmaker, and the Co-head of Documentary at the National Film and Television School. He has run the department since 1995, where he worked with graduates including Nick Broomfield, Kim Longinotto, Simon Chambers, Sandhya Suri and George Amponsah. Dick has directed over forty films for television and the independent media, and has had retrospectives in New York, Paris, Barcelona and Sao Paulo.