Jonathan is Head of Video at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Before that, he worked at the BBC for 10 years as a Producer and Director making features and documentaries. 

Lindsay is Head of Documentaries at the Guardian where she commissions and curates the Guardian’s documentary films. Her core focus is the documentary strand for short films with character-led narratives about compelling, contemporary stories, including the Oscar-winning Colette. Lindsay is passionate about innovation in digital storytelling and has a strong journalistic as well as filmmaking background. Her work has been shown at festivals around the world and has been recognised with a number of prestigious awards.

Matt leads a global team working with journalists to help strengthen digital skills, collaborate on industry challenges, and support innovation in the newsroom. The News Lab forms part of the Google News Initiative, an effort to work with the news industry to help journalism thrive in the digital age.

Matt has been at Google for 9 years, during this time he’s led multiple election projects focusing on fact-checking initiatives, data journalism and broadcast partnerships. Matt was the first member of the News Lab outside the U.S, and launched Europe’s first News Lab Fellowship, he was also responsible for partnerships including The Royal Family’s first experiment with interactive livestreams. 

Before joining Google, he was a television reporter and producer at BBC News for eight years.

Mikhail is an author, journalist, creative producer, and founding Editor-in-Chief of the Russian independent news TV-channel, Dozhd (2010 – 2015). His bestseller All the Kremlin’s Men is based on an unprecedented series of interviews with Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, presenting a radically different view of power and politics in Russia. His book The Empire Must Die portrays the years leading up to the Russian revolution and the vivid drama of Russia’s brief and exotic experiment with civil society before it was swept away by the Communist Revolution.

Mikhail is the founder of the creative studio Future History specializing in inventing new genres of storytelling. Future History launched Project1917. Free History (an online project that enables participants to learn about the events of 1917 from those who lived during this defining moment of history) and 1968.digital (a docuseries that lets you witness one of the wildest years in history the way you witness the news now). Its most recent venture Mobile Art Theater is an innovative award-winning app with immersive audio performances.

He is also the winner of the CPJ International Press Freedom Award (2014) and TED Fellow (2018).

Ravin is an innovative executive producer/journalist with 10 years experience working in news, current affairs and digital journalism. He is currently Head of UK Insight at BBC News, a new unit focussed on long and short form journalistic treatments for underserved audiences. He recently returned to the BBC after leaving in 2018 to become an Editor at the slow news startup, Tortoise.

Previously, he was senior editor in the BBC’s long form audio dept, and executive producer for BBC Stories – the BBC’s first digital current affairs strand. Ravin also worked as a senior broadcast journalist for BBC News. He was identified as an “Emerging Leader” on the first BBC News Leadership programme, and is alumni of the Edinburgh TV Festival’s ‘Ones to Watch’. Before joining BBC, Ravin led the team behind NewsPoint, a digital news gathering operation in London.

Claudia is an investigative data journalist, co-founder, and data editor of Cuestión Pública, an independent investigative media outlet. She was one of the architects of the most complete database of the armed conflict in Colombia built at the National Center of Historical Memory, and she covered the Trump election from ProPublica in New York. Claudia is obsessed with supporting investigative journalism with technology and data journalism.

Claudia was a member of the winning team of the 2016 Ortega y Gasset Award in the best multimedia work category, she also won first honorable mention in the 2016 Inter-American Press Association Awards in the multimedia coverage category and won an honorable mention in the 2015 IPYS Investigative Journalism Awards. She has a Master’s degree in Economic and Social Development Studies at Sorbonne University in Paris.

As head of impact at WaterBear, Lisa is responsible for all of our non-profit partnerships, community mobilisation around their causes and all of the impact campaigns and reporting. 

Prior to WaterBear, Lisa spent over 15 years campaigning on multiple issues with NGOs including Greenpeace and Avaaz. She was often creating and leading digital mobilisation projects, media stunts, campaign strategy and political advocacy. Recently, Lisa was the Environmental Campaigns Manager for Patagonia in Europe where she led campaigns together with partner NGOs; including taking on the salmon farming industry in Europe alongside Patagonia’s documentary Artifishal and pushing Equinor to back off from drilling in the Great Australian Bight. 

Lisa also has a background in marine zoology and wildlife conservation and in a former life she studied endangered species and taught scuba diving in Bermuda where she was born.

Aishwarya is an award winning wildlife photographer, filmmaker and presenter. She has worked with various TV networks and organisations like National Geographic, Discovery Channel, DD National, Canon India and WWF-India. Her work has been featured in international and national newspapers and magazines like BBC Wildlife, Guardian, Mongabay, Digital Camera, Times of India, Sanctuary Asia, Saevus to name a few. In 2020, she became the first Indian woman to win at the Wildlife Photographer of The Year Awards in London.

Noel is a producer, creative director, and storyteller with a passion for natural history and stories of African conservation. After dropping out of law school, Kok began his 25-year career in management, marketing, music and media production. Noel has produced, directed and distributed a number of albums, live shows, documentary shorts, and a conservation TV series.

Noel’s real passion is creating opportunities and unlocking barriers to entry for African storytellers. Noel is a co-founder and Executive Director of Nature, Environment & Wildlife Filmmakers, an organization dedicated to transforming wildlife, science, and conservation storytelling in Africa and supporting the continent’s next generation of conservation filmmakers.

Sonali is an independent journalist and researcher covering science, climate, and environmental issues. She recently finished her Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston in 2020. Her stories have taken different forms, from print, video, data visualization to art installations. Her work has been published in several outlets such as The Guardian, The Washington Post, Hakai Magazine, Mongabay, Quartz, and Esquire Singapore.

Previously, she worked as an investigative reporter at Columbia University’s Energy and Environment Project, and her team’s series on dirty fossil fuel investments made under the Obama administration won an Honorable Mention at the Society Of Environmental Journalists Awards. She has also worked on an innovative team project combining technology and storytelling to pull out coral reef health data from citizen-sourced underwater images. She is a former Google News Lab Fellow and Pulitzer Traveling Fellow. She has been selected for the Logan Science Journalism fellowship at the prestigious Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, which has been deferred to the summer of 2021/22 due to the pandemic.

Qila Gill is a film producer and programmer working across documentary, fiction and artist film. Currently part of the artistic team at Sheffield Doc/Fest as a selection committee, she has previously programmed for Experimenta BFI London Film Festival, London Short Film Festival and Aesthetica Film Festival. Presently, in post-production for 2020 Jarman Award winner Michelle Williams Gamaker’s The Bang Straws, she is also co-producing Nepali filmmaker Asmita Shrish’s debut feature doc with Min Bahadur Bham, while in development with artist Onyeka Igwe and Beverley Bennett. She is a fellow at the Royal Society of Arts.

Adeyemi is a multi award-winning filmmaker/artist. His work primarily centers the African and black experience. Telling stories of resilience, existence, reimagining and transformation of people both in the diaspora and on the African continent. Being Nigerian born and raised in London his Yoruba heritage and culture has featured heavily in his work embracing all from the mundane to stories of wonder. He is intent on carving out narratives that allow the stories he tells to have agency, nuance and license to be free from constraint but most importantly bringing value to African/Black life. At the heart of his work is empathy both on and off screen.

Jonny commissions original documentary films out of the UK for the global streaming platform, Netflix. Jonny has worked across titles such as American Murder: The Family Next Door, Tiger King, Don’t F**k With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer and Night on Earth. Prior to joining Netflix, Jonny worked at Rogan Productions as an executive producer. His directing credits include Protecting our Parents (BBC Two), Life And Death Row (BBC Three) and Great Ormond Street (BBC Two). Jonny has also served as an executive producer on BBC Panorama doc Can Violent Men Change? and BBC World News’ Start Up Libya. Jonny’s work has won a Grierson Award and been nominated for the BAFTAs and RTS Awards.

Mazen is one of Syria’s most prominent activists and advocates of free speech, a pioneer in strategic litigation and a historical civil society actor. Mazen is the founder of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM). He has been active in the fight for Human Rights since the late nineties and has been recognised as such by international organisations and institutions through rewards and titles. 

Mazen is a Syrian Lawyer and journalist, his positions and his will to unfold and change the Syrian story have led him more than once to jail and prevented him from traveling outside Syria for more than ten years. He has fought for freedom and for the marginalised in a context where such actions were prohibited and he now tirelessly carries on these efforts from Europe, as nothing but democracy will prevent the constant human rights violations in Syria, will preserve human dignity and achieve some justice for the Syrians everywhere.

Krishnan is one of the main anchors of Channel 4 News. He also fronts Channel 4 News’ podcast Ways to Change the World which interviews one guest at length each week about the big ideas in their lives and the events that have helped shape their thinking. 

Since joining the team in 1998 he has fronted big events from the Omagh bombing, 9/11, the Mumbai attacks, to special war reports from Syria, Yemen and Gaza. Having covered five British general elections he does special political shows for Channel 4 such as the Ask the Chancellors debate. 

Krishnan reports for the foreign affairs series Unreported World and commentates on major live events for Channel 4 such as the Paralympics Ceremonies. He also anchors controversial programmes outside the news including the first live televised Autopsy.

His TV career began at the age of eighteen presenting youth television for the BBC. He went on to present, report and produce a variety of programmes from Newsround to Newsnight.

Rageh is a Somali-born British journalist and writer. He was a BBC world affairs correspondent, where he made his name reporting from Iraq. In September 2006, he moved to a new post at Al Jazeera English, where he presented the nightly weekday documentary series Witness until January 2010. The Rageh Omaar Report, first aired February 2010, is a one-hour, monthly investigative documentary in which he reports on international current affairs stories.

From January 2013, he became a special correspondent and presenter for ITV News, reporting on a broad range of news stories, as well as producing special in-depth reports from all around the UK and further afield. A year after his appointment, Omaar was promoted to International Affairs Editor for ITV News. Since October 2015, alongside his duties as International Affairs Editor, he has been a Deputy Newscaster of ITV News at Ten. Since September 2017 Omaar has occasionally presented the ITV Lunchtime News including the ITV News London Lunchtime Bulletin and the ITV Evening News.

Sola is a broadcast journalist and interview producer.  She is currently an Assistant Editor at BBC World Service Languages in London.  She has worked in News for twenty years – first in radio and later television. Before joining the World Service in 2019, she worked for several years on the BBC’s flagship interview programme Hardtalk where she produced interviews with world leaders and celebrities.

Sola has also worked for Al Jazeera English in its Doha and London newsrooms.

She worked as a freelancer for the Qatar Foundation series, The Doha Debates.  Her special programme that brought the (at the time) warring Palestinian factions of Hamas and Fattah together on the same stage won an AIB award.

She was also a core member of Deutsche Welle’s New Arab Debates team – in which Tim Sebastian brought together opposing voices in Egypt, Tunisia and Jordan to debate on topical issues in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

Danish is a multimedia journalist with over 13 years of experience spanning some of India’s largest broadcast, digital and print newsrooms. Most recently, he was the South Asia Editor at VICE World News. He has travelled across the length and breadth of India to produce ground-breaking stories on identity politics, social justice, human rights, trafficking and slavery. He has reported from conflict zones including the Maoist infested pockets in central India and the No Man’s Land along the India-Bangladesh border.

In 2019, he was trained at Missouri School of Journalism (USA) and worked at the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper for six months as an Alfred Friendly Press Partners Fellow. His work has won the UNFPA Laadli Media and Advertising Award for Gender Sensitivity 2013-14; Lorenzo Natali Media Prize 2015 (shortlisted) and the opportunity to attend Reporting Slavery & Trafficking course conducted by Thomson Reuters Foundation in London (2015). He holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Convergent Journalism from A.J.K. Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia (New Delhi, India) and a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from Delhi University.

Athandiwe is a multi-award-winning journalist who is passionate about data, human interest issues, governance and everything that isn’t on social media. She is an author, an avid reader and trying to find the answer to the perfect balance between investigative journalism, online audiences and the decline in newspaper sales. It’s a rough world and a rewarding profession.

Palestinian reporter Shatha Hammad was born in the occupied West Bank village of Silwad, east of Ramallah, where she still lives. She has reported from the ground for Middle East Eye since 2018 as part of her ongoing work as a journalist writing for local, regional and international media. Shatha has been detained at Israeli army checkpoints, covered violent military crackdowns and routinely has her movement and work impeded. Through all this, she continues to produce groundbreaking reporting that leads the world’s coverage.

In 2019 she was the first to speak to Rashida Tlaib’s grandmother, and report on the heartbreak that followed Israel’s decision to ban the US congresswoman from visiting her family home in the West Bank. The international media soon followed suit. Shatha was awarded the One World Media New Voice Award in 2020 for her courageous work.

Marina has a degree in Journalism from the State University of Londrina (UEL), Brazil. She worked as a reporter at UEL FM radio and as a press officer for a multinational company through the PR agency InPress Porter Novelli, where she participated in international product launching campaigns. Since 2014, she has been the communication coordinator and a member of the management board of Agência Pública.

She has dedicated herself to launching innovative journalism projects at Agência Pública for the past six years. She is also responsible for coordinating the distribution of contents from Agência Pública to various media outlets in Brazil and abroad.

Louise is managing editor and part of the leadership team at Sky News.  She’s previously been a senior news editor, a programme producer, and head of audience for numerous live televised debates. Louise began her career in commercial radio and was editor of the IRN news service for UK commercial radio.

Julie became part of the BBC Daytime and Early Peak commissioning team in March 2017, developing many new and established brands and overseeing their move into Peak.  As commissioning editor of long-running series like Great British Menu, Escape to the Country, Crimewatch Live and new brands like  Frontline Fightback, the challenge is to keep the shows fresh and vibrant by working closely with the extraordinary teams that make them. 

Before joining the BBC, Julie worked as a series producer/showrunner in current affairs and daytime programming, covering both studio, outside broadcasts and pre-recorded programmes.  She has produced and directed various documentaries including the RTS award-winning Living with Michael Jackson, viewed by over 155 million people worldwide, and series produced prime-time popular factual series like BBC One’s Shop Well for Less.   

Disabled since birth, Julie is committed to increasing on-screen portrayal and off-screen representation of all under-represented groups, and took part in Channel 4’s Year of Disability in 2016, and appears regularly as a panellist on discussions about disability in broadcasting and film.

Mercy is a features writer and editor at Standard Media Group in Nairobi. She is also a regular contributor at scidev.net, a global news outlet that focuses on science and technology. 

Her stories are mostly on human interest, health, education, gender and children issues. She was the Neiman 2020 visiting fellow at Harvard University, and she is 2016 alumni of the Alfred Friendly Press Partners Fellowship where she worked at the features desk at the Oklahoman newspaper in the USA. Her passion is to bring more underreported stories to all media outlets.

May is a reporting fellow at Type Investigations, and an award-winning magazine writer. She is best known for her months-long investigation into the MSF hospital bombing in Kunduz, Afghanistan for The Intercept. This won her the 2017  South Asian Journalists Association’s Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding Report on South Asia, as well as the Prix Bayeux Calvados Award for War Correspondents in the Young Reporter category.

Her reporting for The Intercept, New York Times, London Review of Books, Harper’s, Financial Times, and In These Times has won the Society of Business Editors and Writers’ Award, the One World Media New Voice Award, and has been shortlisted for the Canadian Online Publishing Awards in the Best Investigative Article category, the Kurt Schork Awards, and the Livingston Awards.

Lubna is the Jerusalem bureau chief for Middle East Eye, for which she has worked since it was established in 2014. 

Lubna is responsible for coordinating a team of journalists based on the ground in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel and Jerusalem, deciding how best to report events from the region. In 2020 Shatha Hammad, a team member working from the West Bank, won the prestigious One World Media New Voice Award. And in November 2020, Maha Hussaini, who is based in Gaza, won the Martin Adler Prize by the Rory Peck Trust.

Lubna, who is herself Palestinian, has also covered stories including the recent elections in Israel and the Lions Gate uprising in East Jerusalem in 2017. Before joining MEE, Masarwa worked at the Alquds University in Jerusalem as a community organiser, and also coordinated visits by British lawmakers and journalists to Israel Palestine.

Dickens Olewe is a Kenyan journalist working for the BBC, and an alumni of the John S. Knight journalism fellow at Stanford University. His interest is in using new technology for storytelling and integrating the public in the news reporting process. He has been a speaker at several journalism conferences around the world on several topics including: constructive journalism, drones for news, podcasting and user-centred design thinking.

He also runs The Dickens Olewe podcast where he interviews guests on media, politics and technology in Africa.

Josephine is a celebrated connector, experienced international development consultant, social change maker in residence and podcaster from Nairobi. She brings people together and as co-lead of Africa Podfest brings the best of Africa in podcasting to the world. She is also a member of the 2020-1 Google Podcasts creator program Advisory Committee.

She speaks to audiences around the world about using their research, voice and platform to create community change. Using film and mixed media, she has led other innovative projects in the African advocacy space mobilising new media to bring community partners together for women and girls’ empowerment. She is on the Board of The Action Foundation Kenya focused on inclusive education for children and young people living with disabilities.

Pasca is Director of Media at the British Red Cross. She heads up a communications team which aims to bear witness to the challenges faced by people in crisis around the world, including refugee and asylum seekers. Pasca has 14 years’ experience developing communications campaigns for charities, public health initiatives and leading brands.

A journalist student who has an interest in representing people especially those whose voices are not heard. Marwa is also a voice ambassador at The Voices Network and is passionate about making a difference in people’s lives and communities.

Jane Flanagan is the Africa Correspondent of The Times. She has spent most of the last two decades in South Africa working as a foreign correspondent for a variety of British newspapers.  Prior to that, she was assistant news editor of the Daily Telegraph in London. During one of her failed attempts to leave journalism, Jane spent four years in the occupied Palestinian territory as a consultant with the United Nations.

Mina is a documentary filmmaker and producer. She has made several awarded documentary films on social issues which have premiered in IDFA, Thessaloniki, Sheffield, Tribeca, London Film Festival including Profession: Documentaries, Braving the Waves and The Art of Living in Danger. Since Mina established her documentary film production MinDoc Film Production in Iran in 2013, she produced and directed 2 interactive documentaries in co-production with the Netherlands and granted by Netherlands Film Institute.

In 2016 she directed and produced Braving the Waves a feature length documentary film supported by IDFA Bertha Fund, Sorfond, Fritt Ord, which won best documentary film award in London International Documentary Festival. Mina’s new film The Art of Living in Danger has been supported by Arte/ZDF, NRW Cinema Fund and HotDocs International CrossCurrent Theatrical Fund. It also received the best pitch award in MipDoc 2017 in Cannes.

Talal is a producer of documentary and fiction films and arts & culture projects. Through his creative label Linked Productions, he produces and distributes films by Arab filmmakers. As Senior Producer at Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmed Cultural Centre in Kuwait, Talal also produces multi-media performances with international artists and designers, including 59 Productions. 

Talal holds a BA and MA in Film & Moving Image Production from Leeds Beckett University. In 2015, he was a Producing Fellow at the Center for Asian American Media, which funded his documentary Jaddoland.

Nina is a digital media consultant advising on content and podcast strategy for clients including the Times of India group.  She also delivers digital media and journalism lectures at Birmingham City University, home to the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity.  She campaigns for inclusion of journalists from less privileged backgrounds; she is a Punjabi Sikh and attended a comprehensive school in the West Midlands from where she gained a place at Oxford University to study PPE. 

A winner of the prestigious Peabody Award for producing the BBC World Service documentary Europe’s Migrant Crisis and receiving a Foreign Press Association prize presenting and producing Chicago Dog Fighting.  Nina worked as a broadcaster and senior journalist for the BBC World Service documentaries unit for over ten years and travelled the world making programmes such as Strangers for Hire from Japan.  Nina was also the BBC’s UK Affairs and Global Development Reporter and headed a citizen journalism hub for the News and Current Affairs Division. Prior to joining the World Service, Nina lived in Kingston, Jamaica as a foreign correspondent.  She completed a Masters in Economics in 2018, is Vice Chair of Governors and is currently setting up her own media company.

Nino is a Georgian documentary filmmaker – author of several award-winning documentaries, including English Teacher, Altzaney, and A Tunnel – her latest documentary, a co-production with ZDF/ARTE, that premiered at IDFA 2019. It won the Grand Prix at Trento Film Festival, Best International Film awards at Montenegro’s Underhill FF, Makedox and DokuBaku. 

Alongside directing and producing, Nino teaches documentary & experimental filmmaking at GIPA (Caucasus School of Journalism and Media Management) in Tbilisi, Georgia for almost 10 years, and works as a mentor & commissioning editor for the Media Platform Chai-Khana, supervising documentary film production in the South Caucasus. She established Artefact Production 12 years ago after quitting news journalism related jobs and moving into creative documentary production. Nino studied journalism, TV production and documentary film in Goldsmiths, University of London (MA) and Tbilisi State University (BA).

Ghada is a recent graduate of the National Film and Television School where her graduation documentary won several accolades including a Grierson award and is longlisted for a BAFTA. She was previously a researcher at the legal charity Reprieve where she investigated a number of complex, high-profile press-facing cases across Africa and the Middle East.

She also has a wide media experience having worked at ITN Productions and completed placements at Channel 4 News and Al Jazeera.

Ruona is a multimedia journalist and researcher with 17 years’ experience, across mainstream print, radio, wire agency, TV and digital outlets across Nigeria, South Africa, the UK, Germany and the Netherlands.

Ruona’s investigative documentary Sweet Sweet Codeine gave Nigeria and the BBC World Service its first Emmy nomination (2019), winning the One World Media Television Documentary Award category and the BBC News Award for Investigation of the Year, as well as a British Journalism Award nomination in the same year. 

Currently a PhD scholar researching African-Diaspora investigative journalism networks, she recently served as Head of Research on Unmasked, a high-profile documentary on Nigeria’s COVID-19 response (for release mid-2021).

Cassie is a producer/director with a background in documentary and comedy shorts. His first BFI funded feature length film Generation Revolution was released in cinemas in the UK and toured the US and South America. He is currently directing a new feature called Malcolm that is part-funded by IFP/HBO. He is also directing an hour-long TV documentary about Stokely Carmichael for BBC4.

Cassie is currently an Eccles Fellow at the British Library and his work has been featured in The Guardian, Teen Vogue and i-D Magazine amongst many others.

HR has been a journalist since 2001. In 2018-19 he was a John S. Knight journalism fellow at Stanford University.

He was one of the founding editors of The Quint and a Senior Anchor at CNN-IBN until he left TV news. HR has been a reporter, anchor, editor, entrepreneur, and consultant. He grew up in Bangalore and now lives in New Delhi. He works as Director of Training for BOOM, an organisation that fights misinformation in India.

Maria is the Director of the Department in the European Investment Bank (EIB) that handles the lending operations in Africa, Caribbean and Pacific, Asia and Latin America. In these regions, EIB’s finance is focused on development and pro-poor investments with infrastructure as a key enabler for economic growth and opportunities, as well as on support to the private sector (in particular SMEs and micro-entrepreneurs), food security, agro-industries, sustainable energy, water, telecommunications and transport, always aligning with the global external strategy of the European Union. 

Maria joined the EIB in 1997 and has had a number of responsibilities, including as Head of the Strategy Division of the EIB until June 2016. In this role her aim was to maximize the impact of the EIB, in a sustainable manner, to deliver on the Bank’s mission to make a significant contribution to the future of Europe, its partners and its citizens by promoting economic and social cohesion in the EU and beyond. In this position, Maria was directly involved in the design of the Investment Plan for Europe (IPE) and the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI).

Previously, Maria was heading the Division in charge of restructuring, new products and equity investments in the Legal Department of EIB.

With her legal background and sound business understanding Maria has over the years contributed to product innovation in EIB, always seeking new ways in which EIB could adapt and serve better the interest of the EU and European citizens.

Zaina is an award winning Syrian journalist and communication expert, who has been working in this field for more than a decade with special focus on gender equity. She trained and coached 100s of citizen journalists in the Middle East and North Africa, and contributed to three books related to journalism in conflict and women.

Zaina has an MA in International Journalism from City University of London and is an advocate for breaking the gender stereotyping of the MENA women. She was a judge in many journalism awards including the European Commission Journalist Prize Lorenzo Natali and Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Awards.

Zilanie is a feminist, journalist and socialite activist with purpose. Zilanie works with movements that intersect gender and climate change. Such interventions most recently include co-founding ICON (Institute for the Conservation of Nature) and working with Lilongwe Wildlife Trust and UNDP. 

Zilanie’s professional career grew from being a newspaper managing editor in the Malawi media to an impassioned advocate in the creative industries with the Lake of Stars Festival and Arterial Network Africa. She directs and writes resistance theatre in Chitenje Changa, the Malawian inspired Vagina Monologues. In the gender civil society sector she has worked with Girl Effect Malawi and UN Women in partnerships and fund mobilisation. Masks4AllMalawi is the covid-19 initiative she works with in supporting the national efforts to reduce infections in the globally challenging pandemic.

Zilanie believes the future and impact of social transformation needs creative and innovative communications with increased visibility to mobilise communities to actively participate in changing their lives and safeguarding opportunities and resources. 

Alex is a program officer for Global Media Partnerships at the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation. In this role, Alex helps set up media partnerships for the foundation as well as manage a portfolio of media investments in support of the foundation’s global health and development goals in Africa, India, China, Europe and the US. 

Before joining the foundation, Alex was Executive Producer of editorial partnerships at the BBC in London. He was responsible for designing a coherent strategy for sustainable editorial relationships across Africa and established bespoke editorial relationships between the BBC and chosen affiliates on the continent. This was the culmination of an eighteen-year long career as an international multimedia journalist. During his time at the BBC, he also presented several of the BBC’s African news and current affairs programmes on radio and TV including BBC Africa debate, the award-winning Africa Have Your Say, World Have Your Say, Focus on Africa and Network Africa. 

Alex also worked for three different radio stations in Uganda between 1997 and 2004. A passionate advocate of collaboration, Alex is a firm believer in the power of partnership.

John is the BBC’s Beijing correspondent, a position he’s held since 2015. He joined the BBC in 2003, where he was a reporter for 4 years on Radio 4. John became Dhaka correspondent in January 2007 and Seoul correspondent in September 2007, before moving to Shanghai in 2012.

John was awarded the OWM International Journalist of the Year Award in 2020 for his work covering the Uighur camps in China. The work generated massive media pick-up around the world and changed the political debate about China, from Washington to London and beyond. The original reporting on the Xinjiang Muslim story was a ground-breaking investigation into the camps that first brought their existence to the attention of the world.

Eleni is a CNN correspondent and anchor of Connecting Africa on CNN International.  Born in Greece and raised in South Africa, she has more than 15 years’ experience working across TV, digital, radio and print media.

One of CNN’s most versatile correspondents, she has interviewed heads of state including former South African President, Jacob Zuma, and former Nigerian President, Goodluck Jonathan, alongside the likes of IMF Managing Director, Kristalina Georgieva, ECB president, Christine Lagarde, and Virgin founder, Richard Branson.  She has also sat down with NBA Commissioner, Adam Silver, Toronto Raptors President, Masai Ujiri, basketball legends, Bismack Biyombo and Dikembe Mutombo, as well as a ‘who’s who?’ of Africa’s most prominent business leaders, from Aliko Dangote, Tony Elumelu and Patrice Motsepe, to the late Bob Collymore. 

At CNN she has reported on the ground across Africa, from Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt and Zimbabwe, to Rwanda, Senegal, Ghana, Lesotho and more. She has highlighted the growing links between Africa and Asia, reporting from South Korea and Kazakhstan, travelled to the United States to report from Washington DC, and anchored shows from the network’s London, New York and Atlanta hubs.  She was made an IMF Fellow in 2014.

Jessica is the Foreign Editor for the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, responsible for all foreign coverage in print and online. She joined the Telegraph in 2011 and covered the London 2012 Olympics before reporting on investments and finance. She joined the foreign team in 2014 and became the paper’s youngest Foreign Editor in 2018. 

Jasmin is an award-winning multimedia journalist with about a decade of experience in editorial professions. She helped launch Al Jazeera English’s (AJE) first news and current affairs podcast, The Debrief, as a host and producer.

She then went on to be a senior podcast producer at Jetty – AJE’s podcasting wing. Her work on the war in Yemen and skin colour politics in South Sudan for the Jetty podcast The Take was nominated, longlisted, and has won multiple awards.

Currently, Jasmin consults and produces podcasts for clients, such as the International Finance Corporation. She also freelances for Euronews’ digital newsdesk.

Jasmin has become known for her ability to distill complex news stories into accessible articles, audio, and video formats.

As Head of Foreign News over the past five years, Nevine has led the programme’s agenda-setting foreign output, enhancing its ability to get extraordinary coverage out of some of the world’s most dangerous places.

From Syria, Somalia to South America, the team has been awarded a raft of coveted accolades during her tenure including two International Emmys for news coverage, a BAFTA and countless RTS Awards. Most recently, she led the programne’s Aleppo coverage with Syrian filmmaker Wa’ad al-Kateab which garnered international acclaim, amassing more than 400 million online views alone.

Co-Founder of the influential website Short of the Week, for 14 years Jason Sondhi has curated shorts for international audiences on the web, via S/W, and as Vimeo’s Lead Curator from 2011-2016. S/W recently welcomed Oscar-winning producer Michael Sugar, Cary Fukunaga & David Gordon Green as minority investors, and partnered with Netflix on a first-look deal, as the company seeks to grow its mission to provide audience and opportunities to the next generation of innovative visual storytellers.

James is UK/IE Head of Studios at Spotify. He sits at the heart of the platform’s transition from a music service into the world’s first true audio network, providing the best on-demand, original and exclusive audio content for the platform which now has over 2.2m podcasts globally.  James started out as a DJ, promoting events while still at school, before going on to run record labels, produce music, and DJ internationally. He continues to produce music today alongside being responsible for leading the UK and Ireland Spotify podcast business. He has been instrumental in the success of the podcast growth in the markets, now the third largest globally behind the US and Brazil, and has introduced some hugely successful Exclusive and Original hits in the UK including The Receipts, Jaack Maate’s Happy Hour and Sorted With The Dyers.

Katie is co-founder and Publisher of Tortoise Media with James Harding and Matthew Barzun. Tortoise is a slow media news platform that is committed to looking at what is driving the news and is built on an inclusive and open membership model. More than 80,000 people have signed up to become a Tortoise member since its launched in 2019.

Prior to this new adventure as an entrepreneur, Katie was the President of Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, where she led the company to over 3m subscribers, the largest number in WSJ history. She has previously worked at the Telegraph Media Group and The Times, where, as Chief Marketing Officer, she was the architect of the newspaper’s early move to paid digital subscriptions. She created the UK’s first news membership brand, Times+, and oversaw the events programmes, including both the Wall Street Journal CEO Council and the Times CEO Summit. She was named Pioneer of the Year at the British Media Awards. Kaite is also vice-patron of the charity, Family Action and a Strategic Adviser to Big Change.

Narumon is an award-winning documentary director/producer with a focus on investigation and social affairs.

Southeast Asian-based, she has a strong passion for telling stories about the complex social issues affecting her region for broadcasters such as HBO Vice News, Al Jazeera 101 East, Undercover Asia, SBS Europe and Arte France. She was also a member of the International Bangkok Documentary Award jury 2020.

She has a nose for great stories and the careful, long-term research it takes to pull them together with accuracy and compelling detail. But she also drives her work with a human touch, an open mind and empathy towards the subjects of her stories.

Phineas joined Forbidden Stories as an investigative journalist in September 2020. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Global Citizen in New York City, where he reported on humanitarian issues. He holds a joint master’s degree in journalism and human rights with a focus on Latin America from Sciences Po in Paris, and his previous work has been published in AFP, News Deeply and Atlas Obscura.

Daniel has spent over 20 years commissioning, producing and directing high profile unscripted TV. He is currently a Commissioning Editor at ViacomCBS overseeing a large number of factual shows on Channel 5. Previously he was Deputy Head of News & Current Affairs at Channel 4 where he originated the award-winning Leaving Neverland documentary, oversaw Channel 4 News and was the editor of Dispatches. Daniel also spent 15 years at the BBC where he was Deputy Editor of Newsnight, 10 O’Clock News and Panorama.

Viktorija looks after planning and digital content production for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Before that, she worked for NATO in Afghanistan training journalists and prior to that for the BBC Russian Service, looking after planning and content production based in London.

Deborah is a multi-award winning British reporter with Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit. She has covered the world’s most troubled regions, including Northern Ireland in the 1980’s, Bosnia and Iraq in the 90’s to modern day Congo, Pakistan and the Middle East. She has frequently gained unprecedented access to break stories, from the role of police death squads in Iraq to the widespread abuse by coaches of young football players in Britain.

A journalist, editor and communications specialist, Anna is Editor in Chief and co-founder of Outriders. Anna’s previous experience has been at “Wprost” weekly, PWN Publishing House, Sage, and PZU. She studied journalism, social communications, political marketing, and editing. She also co-created a top-rated blog about travelling called Podróżniccy.com.

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Ketzalli is a Mexican journalist. She is interested in journalism oriented towards health and human rights issues. She is the co-director of Factual, a Mexican outlet dedicated to creating networks between media organisations and journalists around Latin America and the Caribbean. For six years, she was a researcher and reporter for the Mexican newspaper, El Universal. Her chronicle, “The man who dreams of a ‘Land of the deaf'” won first place in the text category of the Faces of the Discrimination Award 2016. She participated in cross-border and collaborative investigations with journalists from all over Latin America, one of them was “Violence during Quarantine“, a trans-national investigation about gender-based violence during the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin America, which won the One World Media Digital Media Award in 2021.

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Samba Dialimpa Badji has been the editor of Africa Check, the French-language website, since January 2019. He was previously deputy editor of the same office since joining the organisation in July 2016. Samba studied journalism at the Centre d’Etudes des Sciences et Techniques de l’Information (CESTI) in Dakar. He holds a masters degree in Defense, Security and Peace from Centres des Hautes études de défense et de sécurité de Dakar and the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences of the University of Dakar. Before joining Africa Check, he was deputy editor of the BBC French-language service in Dakar for more than four years, and before that editor of independent Senegalese radio station Océan FM. He previously worked for other media, including the radio station, Walfadjri, the daily newspaper, Le Matin and Radio France Internationale.

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Vincent is the Global Training Manager for the Google News Lab, a team focused on digital tools training to more than half a million journalists and journalism students in 70 countries. Vincent is a former journalist on the business desk at the ‘Sunday Times’ and the ‘Irish Examiner’. Prior to Google, he was a visiting lecturer at City, University of London. Vincent is also responsible for building training partnerships across parts of EMEA.

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Poppy is responsible for jointly running the WaterBear Network, in tandem with overseeing the growth of WaterBear’s community across the network. With over 12 years’ experience as a global industry specialist, Poppy has held senior roles at National Geographic and FOX Networks Group Asia, where she was responsible for corporate and consumer marketing across 14 markets in APAC for shows such as The Walking Dead and Genius.

Sophie Mbugua is an environmental journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya, specialising in climate change reporting. She is the founder of Africa Climate Conversations – a weekly podcast highlighting the climate change story from the African perspective, which she produces and presents. Her work has been published locally in Kenya, regionally, and globally in outlets such as Mongabay, the BBC Science Radio, Thomson Reuters Foundation, Deutsche Welle (DW) and Mail & Guardian. Sophie has facilitated and coordinated press relations for the African Group of Negotiators on Climate Change (AGN), the Africa Renewable Energy Initiative (AREI), and Power Shift Africa during the 22nd and 25th UNFCCC Climate Summit (COP22 and 25), the 2019 UNSG Climate Change Summit, and the IPCC Oceans and Cryosphere special Reports. She has trained journalists with the Future Climate for Africa (FCFA), Media for Climate Justice Project, and numerous presentations during journalism workshops.

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Philippa is Environment and Sustainability Editor at the New Statesman. She was previously Editor in Chief of Energy Monitor and of Foresight Climate and Energy, and has worked as a journalist and in communications on the subjects of climate change, energy and nature for more than 20 years.

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Ramesh Bhushal is an award-winning environment journalist based in Nepal. He is currently associated with the South Asian environmental news site The Third Pole as Nepal Editor and also manages Earth Journalism Network’s activities in South Asia. He has worked as an environment correspondent for Nepal’s largest-selling English daily, The Himalayan Times, and has contributed to BBC Nepali on Science and Environment. His articles have appeared in several national and international outlets including The Guardian, The Wire and Scroll. In 2018, he travelled for 45 days from Tibet to India along the Karnali River that originates in Tibet, flows through Nepal and meets the Ganges in northern India to produce a series that was published by several outlets in Nepal, India and the UK. In 2010, he was honoured with the ‘WWF Media in Conservation Award.’

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Juliet Riddell is Head of New Formats at the Financial Times where she has produced and directed multiple award-winning videos, collaborating with artists to explore current news stories. Juliet was previously a multimedia Commissioning Editor at the Guardian, where she executive produced an award-winning short drama, a new YouTube channel and an arts, current affairs and documentary series. 

Juliet has more than 15 years experience as a TV producer, director and development executive, including producing two BAFTA winning arts series with Grayson Perry for C4 and prime time factual programmes for BBC, ITV and Sky Arts.

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Talal Afifi is an influential professional within the cinema culture and industry in Africa and the Arab World. He is a renowned Sudanese Film curator and producer, president of the Sudan Independent Film Festival (SIFF), which he launched in 2014 as a platform for arthouse cinema, and director and founder of Sudan Film Factory (SFF). Through the Sudan Film Factory, Afifi contributed to producing more than 40 short features to documentaries that have received regional and international recognition. 

Born in Tokyo in 1966, Takahiro began working for NHK as a director in 1990. In 2020, he studied filmmaking at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. Since returning to Japan, he has continued to produce, focusing on international co-productions. He was the first Japanese person to win the Doc Mogul Award at the 2015 Hot Docs Festival, and won the Prix Italia and the ABU Digital Content Award for his work on the 2020 ‘Experience Tokyo Megaquake.’ The international co-production with South Korea, ‘Burning’ (19), won The Critics’ Prizes at Cannes, New York, and LA film festivals. It was also selected for Best Foreign Language Film at the 91st Academy Awards.

Mercy Abang is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is currently the CEO/Managing Director at Hostwriters network as well as a media entrepreneur and editor with Unbias the News. She started her career as a political correspondent on television in Abuja, Nigeria, later moving to developmental reporting and covering world leaders at the United Nations in New York. In 2017, Mercy was a 2017 United Nations (Dag Hammarskjold) Journalism Fellow. 

Mercy has worked as a freelance producer and reporter with Al Jazeera. She was the 2017 Her Network Woman of the Year awardee in broadcast journalism in Nigeria. She has also hosted a TV Show in Berlin and moderated events across the globe. In 2021, Mercy was named one of the most powerful women in journalism in Nigeria by the Women in Journalism Africa(WIJA). 

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Drew Ambrose has worked as a foreign correspondent, investigative journalist, discussions/interview producer and documentary maker. Aside from broadcasting, he has been the editorial lead on many interactive, virtual reality and digital projects. Fluent in Bahasa, he has lived in Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta where he worked full-time in international news bureaus. He was the youngest on-air reporter for Al Jazeera English in 2011, where remains one of the news channel’s most widely travelled correspondents. He has made more than 80 documentaries in 40 countries in the past decade for the programme, 101 East.  Drew has won or been nominated for more than 65 media prizes. His biggest accolades include, the Venice TV Award (Italy), the Wincott Award (UK), four New York Festival Gold Medals (USA), three Human Rights Press Awards (Hong Kong), two Overseas Press Club of America citations and two Walkley Awards (Australia). In 2021, he won International Journalist of the Year at the One World Media Awards.  

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Siddharth Varadarajan has worked as a journalist for three decades. He is Founding Editor of The Wire, India’s leading independent news website. Previously, he was Editor of The Hindu newspaper. He is a recipient of the Shorenstein Journalism Award. An economist by training—he taught at New York University before moving back to India in the 1990s. His book, Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy (Penguin, 2002) is considered an essential documentary record of the anti-Muslim violence which took place in the state that year.

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Jen Judson is the land warfare reporter for Defence News and currently serves as the 115th president of the National Press Club. Previously, she was a reporter at Politico and Inside Defence. Jen was awarded the National Press Club’s 2014 Newsletter Journalism Award for her coverage. She has also won several Defence Media Awards including Best Young Defence Journalist in 2018, Best Unmanned Systems Submission in 2019 and Best Land System Submission in 2020.  Judson began her reporting career in Boston, Mass, as a State House correspondent for the MetroWest Daily News. She also covered city government for the Daily News Tribune in Waltham, Mass. and was a jack-of-all-trades reporter at the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.

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Maryam Ashrafi is a Paris-based Iranian photographer. Born in Tehran in 1982 during the Iran and Iraq war, Maryam is passionate about sociology which led her to focus on social and socio-political issues.

She has been working on stories about refugees in Paris, mobilisation of the Kurdish and Iranian diasporas and the Indignants Movement in Paris. As a freelance photographer, she has covered the wars in Kobane in Northern Syria and Sinjar in Iraqi Kurdistan, until 2018. Her work on Kurdish resistance movements has been the subject of several exhibitions and publications, including The Guardian.

Her first book;  ‘Rising among ruins, Dancing amid bullets’, which has won the PrixHip in Reportage & History category, documents the consequences of war and the lives of civilians returning to their homes in Northern Syria and the autonomous Kurdistan region of Northern Iraq.

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Eleonora Chiarella is Foreign Editor at Sky News where she sources, verifies and delivers international news for all platforms and coordinates staff in more than ten foreign bureaus. At Sky News, she secured exclusive interviews, field produced stories with award-winning correspondents, conducted digital newsgathering investigations and found stories that had the most audience engagement. In 2020, she received the Forbes 30 Under 30 award as youngest Foreign Editor at Sky News.

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Elias Meseret is an award-winning Ethiopian journalist based in Addis Ababa and Nairobi. He worked as a Correspondent for the Associated Press news agency from 2013- 2021, also serving as President of the Ethiopian Mass Media Professionals Association. Elias writes for several local and international media outlets on a wide variety of issues focusing on Ethiopia and the East Africa region. Currently he is an Editor at Ethiopia Check, Ethiopia’s largest fact-checking desk.

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Michael Herrod has been Head of Foreign News at ITV News since 2014. He’s worked at ITN since 1996, working first at Five News before moving to ITV News four years later, where he worked in Brussels and Washington before returning to London. Michael has worked internationally on stories as varied as the death of the Princess of Wales and 9/11 to the Athens Olympics and the Haiti earthquake in 2010.

Mohamed Hassan is an award-winning journalist, writer and broadcaster covering the MENA region for Middle East Eye. In 2017 he was awarded the Gold Trophy at the New York Radio Awards for his RNZ podcast series ‘Public Enemy’.

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Ian Yee is the co-founder of The Fourth, a team of impact and investigative documentary producers whose work with R.AGE has collectively won over 40 awards and two Peabody nominations. The team strives to create a positive impact on social justice issues by combining hard-hitting investigative documentaries and creative public action campaigns delivered mainly through social and interactive media. He is also executive director of the award-winning Environmental Reporting Collective, a global network of journalists and newsrooms dedicated to cross-border collaborative investigations on environmental crimes. Ian’s work in advocating for social justice and press freedom has seen him selected as an Obama Leader, Acumen Fellow, UK International Leaders Programme fellow, Gen-T honoree, Human Rights Measurement Initiative ambassador and UNICEF national consultant.

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Bonnie Chiu is an award-winning social entrepreneur, gender equality advocate and social impact consultant. Recognised as a Forbes 30 Under 30, she is a Senior Contributor on Forbes writing on gender and diversity and has been invited to speak in over 20 countries and two TEDx talks. She is the Founder of social enterprise Lensational, which equips marginalised women with photography and storytelling training, which has scaled to over 1,000 women in 23 countries. She has received multiple accolades for her work, named Asia21 Young Leader by Asia Society, a Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneur, winning the Asian Women of Achievement Award – Young Achiever, the Facebook Social Entrepreneurship Award and the Humanitarian Grand Challenge. She was also featured as the Ambassador for Sustainable Development Goal 5, for Gender Equality, in the Lavazza Calendar. 

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Titus is presently the Director of the Namibia Media Trust (NMT) which, as of 2018, is the first African organisation to contribute financially to the sustainability of the Unesco Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize.

Zoe has dedicated the last 26 years to advancing media freedom and development. She has used her experience to develop a broader intersectional approach and push for access to information as the bedrock of all other rights. Her obsession for universal access to information led to the high-level lobby group – African Platform on Access to Information (APAI) Working Group, which successfully campaigned for UN recognition of September 28 as International Day for Universal Access to Information. Her decade-long stint as former regional director of the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) saw her spearheading a number of projects that provide practical support to journalists in danger. She also worked on transforming the policy environment to support a vibrant and independent media sector.

In understanding the potential of the media, she has contributed to groundbreaking initiatives for positive change in the region. She serves in advisory capacities to ARISA (the Advancing Rights in Southern Africa project) and is co-founder of the single massive open online teaching platform on media policy in Africa, the Jeanette Minnie Memorial Course in African Media Policy in the Digital Age, hosted by the Link Centre and Wits online platform, edX. She also serves as the chairperson of the Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD).

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Leonardo Martins is a journalist specialised in digital outlets focused on exploring new formats on the web. He is currently Audience Director at The Intercept Brasil, working to seek new audiences and create new interactive and audiovisual formats for the brand. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of the Brazil edition of Gizmodo, reporter for Folha de São Paulo, executive editor of R7.com and co-founder of Risca Faca, an outlet focused on long-form journalism and investigations.

Cheri-Ann James is the editor of the Daily Dispatch newspaper in South Africa. Daily Dispatch has always been at the forefront of exposing injustice in the region, producing journalism which has brought the publication local and international recognition. Its journalists have won numerous awards over the years including Vodacom Journalist of the Year, Taco Kuiper, Sikuvile Journalism Awards and CNN African Journalist of the Year Award, among others. One of the Dispatch’s most recent awards was for an investigative series on the Eastern Cape’s ailing health system, which was published just ahead of the Covid-19 crisis. In 2021, the newspaper released a 50-minute documentary titled, Farmer’s Under Siege, that follows two journalists as they investigate the stock theft wars in the Eastern Cape.

Akifa Khan is a Creative Producer and currently a project specialist at Muslim Public Affairs Council’s Hollywood Bureau in Los Angeles. She has produced short films, music videos, and live events. Akifa has consulted on scripts for major studios on Islamic representation. In addition, she helped organise panels, screenwriters’ workshops and young leaders summits aimed to help create opportunities for American Muslim artists. She has previously worked at Sundance in multiple roles. She seeks to create more outlets for healing, compassion and connection through work by her production company, KHANTENT LLC.

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Elaine Bedell is the Chief Executive of the Southbank Centre. She was appointed in May 2017, becoming the first woman Chief Executive of Europe’s largest arts centre in its 66-year history. Previously, Elaine enjoyed a twenty-five year career in the media and has produced and commissioned some of the UK’s most popular and original factual entertainment and comedy titles including, Strictly Come Dancing, Britain’s Got Talent and The One Show. She was BBC Controller of Entertainment as well as Director of Entertainment and Comedy at ITV.

She set up her own production company, Watchmaker, which she later sold to the Chrysalis Group and became the Managing Director of the newly formed commercial arm of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Elaine has won a BAFTA and a British Comedy Award and served as Executive Chair of the Edinburgh International TV Festival for four years. She was appointed a Trustee of the V&A Museum in 2015.

Carlos Eduardo Huertas is the Director of CONNECTAS and Chief of Party of the Investigative Reporting Initiative in the Americas, a project in alliance with the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ). Carlos started CONNECTAS in 2012 as a journalistic platform in LATAM that exposes the abuse of power, promotes the exchange of information and enhances knowledge of key issues in the region. It was started during Huertas’ period as a Nieman Fellow 2012 at Harvard University with the support of the Knight Foundation. His reports on corruption, human rights violations, and environmental issues have earned him several national and international awards.

For more than a decade, Huertas was Investigation Editor at Semana Magazine, a leading publication in Latin America. He began his journalistic career as a correspondent for the Press and Society Institute (IPYS), monitoring press freedom and freedom of expression. In 2006 he founded Consejo de Redacción (CdR), a professional association in Colombia that promotes investigative journalism. He has been honoured by CdR as well as the Forum of Journalists of Argentina (FOPEA) and as Master Guest of the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation for New Latin American Journalism (FNPI). He has been elected twice as a member to the Board of Directors of Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) and has served on the Board of Colombia’s Foundation for Freedom of the Press (FLIP). He currently serves as part of the leadership of the Global Network of OSC, Innovation For Chance (I4C). He has been a member since 2011 of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalism (ICIJ) and participated with them in several investigations including the Panama Paper investigation, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017. 

Paul Lewis is Head of Investigations at The Guardian. He has held several key roles at the newspaper since joining as a trainee in 2005, including Associate Editor, San Francisco Bureau Chief, Washington Correspondent and Special Projects Editor. He has won 15 major journalism prizes and is a rare two-time winner of the prestigious ‘Reporter of the Year’ prize at the British Press Awards.

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Suyin Haynes is editor in chief at gal-dem, a new media publication based in the UK committed to sharing perspectives of people of colour from marginalised genders. Previously, she was a journalist with TIME magazine based in both London and Hong Kong, covering gender, culture and underrepresented communities.

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Ciku is editor of Quartz Africa. She is the author of two novels, and has written for a variety of outlets, including African Arguments, OkayAfrica, and The Africa Report. Ciku has a wealth of communication and project management experience, having worked for and served as a communication advisor to Dalberg Advisors, Open Society Initiative of West Africa, and The Africa Agriculture and Trade Investment Fund.

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Basia Cummings is an editor at Tortoise Media. She is the host of the weekly investigative podcast, The Slow Newscast, and runs the team behind numerous podcasts including Sweet Bobby, Finding Q, Left to Die, Hidden Homicides, Sensemaker and many more. Before joining Tortoise, Basia worked at HuffPost, the UN and the Guardian’s foreign desk.

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Michael Safi is The Guardian‘s foreign correspondent based in Beirut and the host of its daily news podcast, Today in Focus. He was part of the George Polk-award winning team that reported on the Pegasus Project and was previously the Guardian’s South Asia correspondent, in Delhi, covering India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. He has reported from more than a dozen countries.

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Yasir Khan is Editor in chief at Thomson Reuters Foundation. Yasir came to the Foundation from Euronews, where he was Editor in chief of Digital Platforms. Yasir’s international career spans more than 20 years as an award-winning multimedia journalist, documentary filmmaker, podcaster and editor, across a raft of major international news outlets including Al Jazeera, CBC, CNN and National Geographic. He now leads the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s team of 45 full-time journalists and 300 freelancers reporting on the challenges to human rights posed by climate change, technology and economic policies around the world.

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Jedi Ramalapa is Editor in chief of Sound Africa, a non-profit, non-fiction podcasting organisation with a mission to produce African stories which advance social justice and amplify voices. Sound Africa’s most recent podcast exploring xenophobia in South Africa, One Night in Snake Park, was listed aomng 100 outstanding podcasts of 2020 by the Bello Collective in the non-fiction category. 

Jedi began her career as a Radio and Television reporter at the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) in 2001 where she held several roles including as a radio journalist, news anchor for a radio news bulletin on SAfm and Radio 2000, a current affairs producer, voice-over artist and producer for SABC’s flagship investigative programme, Special Assignment. During her time at SABC, she was assigned to cover a number of international stories for South African audiences including the opening up of China’s Economy (2006), the war in Lebanon (2006) and the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol in Canada (2005). In 2009, she joined Inter-press News Service Africa as a multimedia editor responsible for launching the agency’s radio podcasts platform. She is the recipient of the United Nations Reham Al-Farra Memorial Journalism Fellowship (2008). She is the author of Soweto to Beirut (2021) on PTSD among journalists and has worked in South Sudan as a Media Trainer for Canada’s Journalists for Human Rights (JHR). 

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An accomplished and determined human rights and social justice campaigner, Bharti’s experience spans more than 20 years, championing the rights of children, women, and marginalised communities, leading and managing teams, developing cutting-edge research, monitoring laws, the media and shaping policy. She works to engage leaders and influencers across public, private, and civil society sectors for systemic and transformational changes in policy and practice to end exploitation, protect children and advance child rights globally.

Bharti previously was the CEO of ECPAT UK (Every Child Protected Against Trafficking), where she oversaw fundamental policy changes in child protection in the UK’s Modern Slavery Act. She served as an expert on the Independent Inquiry on Child Sexual Abuse, where she  helped the panel understand the regulatory framework on extraterritorial jurisdiction and how and why institutions fail to prevent transnational sexual exploitation of children. Bharti has worked in the UK and India. She is a trustee on the international board of the Right to Education Initiative.

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Osama Gaweesh is Founder and Editor in chief at Egypt Watch. He is a refugee in the UK and a well-known journalist and TV presenter in Egypt and the Middle East. He made his name as a broadcast journalist with a series of high-profile leaks of secret recordings of Sisi. He has worked as a reporter at Journalism.co.uk and hosts a daily political talk show on Al-Hiwar TV in London. He has written for The Guardian, Newsweek, Media Diversity Institute, HotTopics.htl, and Middle East Monitor.

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Lina Sinjab is an award-winning independent filmmaker and BBC Middle East correspondent based in Beirut. She is also a frequent contributor to Syria From Within, a Chatham House policy initiative. Lina has covered the Syrian uprising extensively since it began in 2011. She has produced and directed, Madness in Aleppo and directed Suryyat, a film about Syrian women during the time of the uprising. In 2014 and 2016, Lina covered the Syria peace talks in Geneva as the BBC’s world affairs reporter. Lina has received the International Media Cutting Edge Award for her coverage of Syria.

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Waliullah Rahmani is a media entrepreneur, journalist and researcher who is currently working as an Asia Researcher with the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). From 2016 to the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August 2021, he was founder and director of Khabarnama Media, one of the first digital media organisations in Afghanistan. Before that Mr. Rahmani has served as a senior advisor with the government of Afghanistan. He also served as the founding director of the Kabul Centre for Strategic Studies from 2007 to 2014.

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Janvier Wete is a Congolese-French, London Based, Founder and CEO of Minute Shorts. He was a finalist of the Great British Entrepreneur Awards in 2020. He sold Made in Brixton TV pilot show to Channel 4 in 2012 when he was 21. His career as an independent film producer includes multiple short and feature films as well as collaborations with Channel 4, Netflix, Vice Media, Google, and Apple. 

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Liz Chege is a film programmer, critic and curator and currently festival director of Africa in Motion Film Festival, Scotland. She is a Berlinale Talent alumni and founding member of, Come the Revolution, a collective of creatives and curators committed to exploring Black life, experience and cultural expression through cinema. She was programme producer of British Council’s, No Direct Flight, at British Film Institute’s Southbank, a cross-media exploration of global African diaspora moving-image makers that interrogated how the digital world has shaped culture and aesthetics. She is an associate curator for Cinema Rediscovered and worked as a freelance marketing specialist for filmmakers and distributors. 

Lesley-Anne Macfarlane co-founded the Filmmakers Collaborative of Trinidad and Tobago, a social enterprise dedicated to creating a sustainable ecosystem for film and television producers and directors in the Caribbean, which also manages the annual trinidad+tobago film festival. She is a producer focused on exploring the strength of cultural identity with experience ranging from commercial productions to independent film in the UK and the Caribbean. A co-producer on the feature documentary, 1990, she is currently in post-production on her first feature film, Little English. Her latest short film, Immune, is on the festival circuit and has won several awards. She was a member of BFI Network X BAFTA Crew 2020 and is currently a mentee in theScreenSkills Pro-Create Mentoring Programme. 

Sam Soko is a director and producer based in Nairobi. His work on socio political projects in music and film has allowed him to connect and work with artists around the world. He is co-founder of LBx Africa, a Kenyan production company that produced the 2018 Academy Award–nominated short fiction film Watu Wote. His first feature documentary, Softie, won best Feature Documentary at the One World Media Awards 2021.

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Tobi Kyeremateng FRSA is a multi-award-winning producer from South London. Working across film, TV, and live work, Tobi has curated an impressive portfolio of work for organisations including BBC, British Vogue, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Jordan, Tate Modern, PUMA and has had her work platformed on BBC Three, BBC Four, Channel 4, NOWNESS, and Sky Arts to name a few.

In 2020, Tobi was invited to be a Fellow at the Royal Society of the Arts and was nominated by BBC presenter, Clara Amfo in the Duke and Duchess’ inaugural Black History Month Next Generation Trailblazers as well as being included in ELLE Magazine’s ’10 Trailblazing Women Changing The Future You Need To Know’ alongside Koffee, Holly Fischer, Celeste, and Margaret Busby. The same year, she was featured on the cover of gal-dem as part of their Community Issue. Tobi has led workshops, guest lectures, and panels for Goldsmiths University, London College of Communication, UAL, and Oxford University as well as hosted conversations with Diane Abbott and Malorie Blackman. Tobi’s directorial debut docu-film, OWAMBE, will be released by Netflix this year.

Marina is an award-winning journalist, self-shooting documentary filmmaker and human rights practitioner from Moldova. She studied documentary filmmaking at University College London on a Chevening Scholarship.  Through the One World Media Global Short Docs Forum 2020, her graduation project, Last Chance for Justice, was commissioned by the BBC World News.

The film won the One World Media Awards in the Student and Short film categories as well as the Special Mention at the International Human Rights Film Festival One World. The film was screened and discussed at numerous human rights events in different parts of the world, including the EU Parliament and the UN.

Previously, Marina was awarded the Senior Minority Fellowship with the UN Human Rights Office and the Sakharov Fellowship with the EU Parliament. She also collaborates with the UN as a human rights consultant.  Coming from an ethnic minority background and born in the small town of Bessarabca, Marina is passionate about stories that diminish divisions between “us” and “them” and create solidarity among people.

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Nicola Zawadi is a multi-award-winning, self-shooting feminist filmmaker with a lens on women. She was born in Tanzania, raised in Trinidad and Tobago and attended university in the UK. Nicola’s collaborative filmmaking process draws upon almost 20 years working with civil society, government and multi-lateral organisations. Since 2012, she has made films with and about women in Trinidad, the UK, Kenya, Tanzania and Myanmar covering subjects from female genital mutilation to black women decolonising the literary canon, disability and a 47-year-old single and childfree woman who, feeling invisible, searches for the antidote.

Nicola uses filmmaking as a tool for women who tell their stories to empower themselves and to shift dominant hegemonic narratives. Most recently, Nicola’s film, Becky, has won awards at the Women Over Fifty Film Festival and the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival. Currently in production in the UK is a documentary on black women’s experience of grief, loss and bereavement.

Roger Clark is Vice President and the Hong Kong Bureau Chief for CNN International. A journalist with 40 years experience, Clark has been with CNN for more than 15 years. Clark has played a senior role in managing CNN’s coverage of many big stories including the Haiti Earthquake, the Arab Spring, the Japanese Tsunami, Typhoon Haiyan and MH370’s disappearance. As head of the Hong Kong bureau, Clark is instrumental in shaping the network’s coverage of major news events including the spread of coronavirus in Asia as well as the Hong Kong protests — coverage which was recognised by the Royal Television Society TV Journalism Awards in the Breaking News category.

Before moving to Asia, Clark spent seven years as a Senior Director of Coverage based at the network’s headquarters in Atlanta. There he was responsible for CNN’s day to day international newsgathering operations and delivering international news to all of CNN’s networks and digital platforms. Prior to Hong Kong, Clark was based in Jakarta for 15 months acting as a senior consultant and advisor for the launch and operation of affiliate channel, CNN Indonesia.

Jonathan is Head of Video at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Previously, he worked at the BBC for 10 years as a producer and director making features and documentaries.

Malaika has worked as a multimedia producer for BBC Afghan service since 2014 based in Afghanistan, currently in London, where she is a Pashto digital producer.  She has a Master’s Degree in Pashto literature from Kabul University and a postgraduate degree in TV Production Journalism from Asian College of Journalism, India.

Sajid is a producer, actor, broadcaster and founder of UK Muslim Film (UKMF), a charity aimed at addressing the often-negative portrayal of Muslims on screen and to enhance representation for Muslim creatives across all aspects of filmmaking. Having worked in the entertainment industry for over 30 years, he has been cast in lead roles for both drama and comedy on primetime British Television. Sajid starred in BBC TV’s ‘Byker Grove’ as well as in shows for ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5. Sajid currently serves as co-Chair of the BFI’s Screen Advisory Group. He has consulted on many film and TV projects and his team are now working to launch the first ever Muslim International Film Festival (MIFF) in 2022. 

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Marjut Falkstedt has been the Secretary General of the European Investment Bank (EIB) since March 2018. She was previously Deputy Secretary of EIB and from 2013 to 2015, Deputy Chief Executive of the European Investment Fund, where she was responsible for Risk Management & Compliance, Finance & Budget, Information and Middle & Back Office. Before joining the EIB group, Marjut worked for the European Commission in the Directorate General Economic and Financial Affairs (ECFIN) where she held various roles in SME and infrastructure financing as well as sovereign lending. Previously, she had different responsibilities in audit and lending within Dredsner Bank.

Megha is the BBC World Service’s first global gender and identity correspondent. She covers race and ethnicity, women’s rights and LGBT communities for the BBC’s 41 language services and reaches a global audience of over 400 million. She has secured exclusive interviews with Finland’s all-women coalition government and Samoa’s first woman Prime Minister. She is a deployment journalist who files longform original features for BBC World TV, radio, online and social media.

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Fatima Manji is an award winning journalist, broadcaster and author. Her recent book, Hidden Heritage, has been described as a brave and calm look at the complexity of history. At Channel 4 News she reports on major national and international stories and is best known for breaking stories with a global impact including the tale of Saudi princesses held hostage for years by their father the King, the testimonies of internally displaced Iraqis fleeing ISIS, investigating an MI5 spy accused of entrapment in Northern Ireland and tracing the perilous journey of victims of war across the Hungarian border in the face of rising anti-migrant extremism. 

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Bashar Abubakar is a health journalist with Nigeria Health Watch, a health communications, research and advocacy organisation in Nigeria. Over the past four years, Bashar has produced more than 60 solutions articles on the impact of the work of individuals, organisations and governments on the lives of people on the African continent. Bashar has 32 articles indexed by the Solutions Story Tracker of the global Solutions Journalism Network, the highest of any journalist from Africa. He has also led several global health research and assessment projects on the continent. Bashar holds a Master of Science in Global Health Delivery from the University of Global Health Equity in Rwanda and a Doctor of Pharmacy from Gulf Medical University Ajman, United Arab Emirates.

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Mandy Chang is newly appointed as Fremantle’s global head of documentaries tasked with creating and managing a slate of world class international documentaries and high-end indie series. For nearly four years, she ran the BBC’s pioneering global feature doc strand, Storyville, where she identified, commissioned and oversaw a strong run of acclaimed international feature docs. She brought her own vision to the much-loved strand, curating a slate of the most talked about documentaries of recent times, among them Collective, Welcome to Chechnya, The Mole: Infiltrating North Korea and Locked In, while extending Storyville’s breadth and diversity and guiding exciting new talent into the field.

Chang has many years of experience working in the docs community across genres, roles and platforms as a highly respected commissioner, executive producer, writer and award-winning filmmaker.

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Kari Nøst Hegseth is the Editor and part of the programming team of HUMAN International Documentary Film Festival in Oslo, Norway. The festival has a large section for documentaries focusing on human rights issues, with a strong focus on the global south. She is a documentary filmmaker and former journalist. She holds an MA in Chinese studies from the University of Oslo and is a part of the China Committee of PEN Norway.

Regys Badi has most notably worked for companies like Discovery, Blast Films, Mentorn Media, Great Point Media and Ourscreen. He has a wicked eye for film distribution and acquisition, as well as scriptwriting and producing in a career that has spanned the last eight years. 

Charlotte Maher (UK) is the Camera Lead at Seen, conceptualizing ways to tell stories through innovative camera led tools. A former BBC and investigative journalist, she has worked across print, audio and video in her career with a focus on first person storytelling. Charlotte has led training courses on mobile journalism, innovation in the industry and digital strategies for citizens, established journalists and media CEOs across multiple countries. She is also a managing producer, producing ground-breaking shows like First Person, Seen’s Snapchat Original showcasing young climate change makers using wearable technology. Many of Seen’s episodes, including in the First Person series, have accompanying augmented reality lenses designed by the team to engage young audiences.

Wale Lawal is the Founder of The Republic, a startup building business and creative tools for creators across Africa. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Republic’s award-winning magazine covering news, debates and ideas on politics, culture, science and more from a Nigerian lens. Wale is a co-founder of GatePass, a digital payments and community management platform for real estate providers. He is an ex-KPMG management consultant and a graduate from the University of Oxford, where his research focused on the politics of tech startups in Nigeria, and he graduated top of his class. In 2019, Wale was selected by Quartz as one of Africa’s top 30 innovators. In 2021, he was selected by Reuters as a global thought leader and by Forbes as one of Africa’s 30 Under 30. Wale has published short fiction and has exhibited artwork at several venues including the Venice Biennale. Wale has also written the Future Yoruba exhibit for the forthcoming John Randle Center for Yoruba Culture and History.

Mary Matheson is an award-winning immersive director specialising in character-led documentaries, high-end branded content, commercials and PSAs. Her clients have included Sky/Comcast, Google, Lenovo, the United Nations, UK Government (BEIS), Save the Children and the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center. Her films have been broadcast on mainstream platforms like the Discovery Channel, BBC & Channel 4 (UK), as well as at international festivals and events such as the UN Climate Change Summit, UN General Assembly, Sheffield Doc Festival, Annecy International Animation Festival & EarthX film festival. 

Her interactive VR experience about the Yazidis in northern Iraq won the 2022 VR Awards for Social Impact. She cut her teeth as a journalist in Colombia, covering the capture of the Cali cartel for NPR, TIME Magazine and the Guardian (UK). Since then she has filmed in multiple post-conflict zones, focusing on untold stories and under-represented narratives. She is currently directing a VR and interactive documentary about NASA for Sky/Comcast and has just directed a VR experience about Dutch Holocaust Survivor Rodi Glass, one of a series of three documentaries produced by East City Films for Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. Matheson is Professor of Narrative & Immersive Media at Arizona State University’s center for Narrative & Emerging Media in Los Angeles. 

Alessandra is the Programs Director at Planet in Focus, Canada’s largest and longest running environmental film festival, and celebrates ten years with the team this year. A graduate of Toronto Metropolitan University’s Media Production Program with a certificate in Entertainment Law from Osgoode Hall, engaging audiences through art is her passion. In addition to two decades performing in Canadian film and theatre, Alessandra is a lifelong advocate for arts in education and has produced workshops and conferences including the charity album Starwalkers: A Celebrity Tribute for MusiCounts, youth filmmaking workshops with the Global Foundation for Democracy and Development in the Dominican Republic, and new media conferences at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. She has participated on industry panels internationally including Festivale FReDD in Toulouse, Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire in Montreal, and CinemAmbiente in Torino. Alessandra currently serves on the Green Film Network International Awards Committee, the EcoSchools Canada Young Reporters for the Environment Jury and the FACTOR Canada Artist Jury.

Ugochi Anyaka-Oluigbo is an international environment and conservation journalist. She is the creator of Green Angle TV show, Nigeria’s most popular environmental TV show. She produced, scripted and presented about 100 episodes of the award-winning show.

From erosions, flooding and desertification in Nigeria, oil pollution in Ogoniland of the Niger Delta, depleting Africa’s last rain forests to frozen lapland, Finland, Ugochi visits rugged terrains to share underreported environmental stories.

She has produced and presented podcasts  for the BBC World Service, Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies and Impacthub Basel, on the impact of climate change.

Her work has fetched her several local and international journalism awards including the 2022 Covering Climate Change Now Awards.

Poppy is responsible for jointly running the WaterBear Network, in tandem with overseeing the growth of WaterBear’s community across the network. With over 12 years’ experience as a global industry specialist, Poppy has held senior roles at National Geographic and FOX Networks Group Asia, where she was responsible for corporate and consumer marketing across 14 markets in APAC for shows such as The Walking Dead and Genius.

Based between Cape Town and Nice, Bérénice Hahn is an award-winning producer of documentary and animation short films. On festival strategy and distribution at Square Eyes, she represents author-driven fiction and documentary features. She was previously the Sales Agent and part of the production team of Generation Africa, a STEPS pan-African collection of 25 documentaries about migration experienced by African youth across 16 African countries, and a Producer on Mzansi in the time of Covid-19, collection about the impacts of Covid-19 on South African communities, of which Lindela Under Lockdown won the Best Documentary Short award at the SAFTAs 2021.

Berry is a 2023 Judge for the Feature Documentary Award at One World Media, 2022 Committee Member and Juror for the Best Writing award at the IDA Documentary Awards, and took part in DIFF’s documentary programming in 2021. Realness Institute alumna, she participated to the Southern Africa-Locarno Industry Academy 2021. Berry is also a IDA, DAE and Collectif 50/50 member.

Mohammed Alatar is one of the major documentary directors of Palestinian cinema. His training as a filmmaker took place during the 90s in the USA. He defines himself as a filmmaker and human rights activist, with deep commitment to films that matter, human rights and people’s struggle. He was nominated for the Martin Luther King Jr. Humanity Award for his films. The former American President Jimmy Carter said of his film ‘The Iron Wall’ “The best description of the (Israel/Palestine) barrier, its routing and impact is shown in the film The Iron Wall.”

As Associate Director of Program, Sabine oversees the design and implementation of several programs in support of women and non-binary documentary filmmakers, including the (Egg)celerator Lab for first- and second-time filmmakers, and Project: Hatched for films reaching completion and in the process of launching an impact campaign. She also works closely with the Program Director on internal management to ensure effective and equitable practices and processes for the Program department. Since 2016, she has managed a range of programs and program activities at Chicken & Egg Pictures, including the Chicken & Egg Award for advanced-career filmmakers.

In 2019, Sabine was selected to be a participant in Film at Lincoln Center’s 4th annual Industry Academy and participated in Creative Capital’s Taller, a career development program for Spanish-speaking Latinx artists in New York City. She is Colombian and French, and holds a BA in Sociology from the Université Paris-Diderot, as well as a MA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Barcelona.

Liliane returned to the BBC in September 2021 from Channel 4 News – where she was Head of Foreign News, responsible for award-winning high-quality and high-impact journalism. A major part of her journalistic career was built at the BBC which she began at the French Service. She went on to manage, present, and edit key programmes and areas of the BBC World Service  where she became  Head of News and Current affairs for WSE and also led the Africa and Middle East departments before becoming Controller of Languages where she was editorially responsible for all non-English language services on radio, TV and online.

Liliane lives in London and is an Arsenal season ticket holder.

Giles Trendle is the Managing Director of Al Jazeera English Channel where he oversees an editorial staff of over 400 people based in its centres of Doha, London, Washington DC and Kuala Lumpur, as well as in over 70 bureaus around the world. Giles first joined Al Jazeera in 2004 to work on the Arabic channel’s flagship investigative documentary show before moving to Al Jazeera English ahead of its launch in 2006. He began his career in the mid 1980’s as a freelance print journalist based in Lebanon covering that country’s civil war.

Giles resides in Qatar where the Al Jazeera Media Network is headquartered. Al Jazeera English produces 24/7 news and current affairs programming for a worldwide TV audience of over 315 million households and mobile content for global digital consumers.

Hadas Gold is the CNN Correspondent based in Jerusalem. Gold previously covered the intersection of media, tech and politics for CNN from London and Washington. Prior to joining CNN, Gold spent more than five years at Politico as a media reporter.

In 2017 Gold was named one of the “most influential media reporters” by Mediaite. In 2011, she was awarded a fellowship with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. As part of the fellowship she travelled to Buenos Aires, Argentina where she reported on the organizing efforts of the cartoneros who flood the city after dark, digging through trash for recyclables to sell. 

She has previously worked and internet at NTN 24, “60 Minutes,” Politifact, and Cox Newspapers. She graduated from the George Washington University with a B.A. in journalism and a M.A. in media and public affairs.

Michael Herrod has been Head of Foreign News at ITV News since 2014. He’s worked at ITN since 1996, working first at Five News before moving to ITV News four years later, where he worked in Brussels and Washington before returning to London. Michael has worked internationally on stories as varied as the death of the Princess of Wales and 9/11 to the Athens Olympics and the Haiti earthquake in 2010.

Yousra Elbagir is the Sky News Africa correspondent, covering major events and stories from across the continent. She has reported on social, cultural and political movements worldwide. Most notably, the 2019 youth-led revolution in Sudan and the global reckoning of Black Lives Matter in Europe and South America in 2020.

Before joining Sky News, Yousra was a foreign news reporter for Channel 4 News and international correspondent for Vice News Tonight on HBO, making documentary-style news films.

Douglas Jehl has been foreign editor of The Washington Post since 2009. He oversees all of The Post’s coverage outside the United States, including 30 correspondents in 22 locations around the world. He spent 16 years as a correspondent, Middle East bureau chief and editor at the New York Times, where he was deputy Washington bureau chief. Educated at Stanford University with a BA in History and at Oxford University with an M.Phil in International Relations, Jehl is the author of ‘Whose Water Is it?’: The Unquenchable Thirst of a Water-Hungry World. Across his lengthy career Jehl has been awarded the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense, 1991; Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, 2002 (as a reporter on New York Times team for reporting on Al Qaeda before 9/11 and Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism, 2009 (as an editor on New York Times team for reporting on the war in Afghanistan).

Khatondi Soita Wepukhulu is a Ugandan feminist investigative journalist based in Kampala. They work as the East Africa Reporter at 50.50 openDemocracy, a global independent media platform based in the UK. They’ve reported on issues including; Western conservative groups and their anti rights funding and influence on LGBTIQ and women’s rights in Africa, anti-rights disinformation on tech platforms for African users, and anti-LGBTIQ ‘conversion therapy’ practices on the continent. Khatondi was One World Media’s 2022 New Voice Winner.’

Lindsey Hilsum is Channel 4 News; International Editor. Her book, In Extremis; the Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin, won the 2019 James Tait Black Prize for biography. Recently she has reported the war in Ukraine, and the aftermath of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. She has covered the major conflicts and refugee movements of the past three decades, including Syria, Mali, Iraq, and Kosovo and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2011 she witnessed the Arab Spring uprisings in Libya and Egypt. She has also reported extensively from Iran, and was Channel 4 News China Correspondent from 2006 to 2008. In 1994, she was the only English-speaking foreign correspondent in Rwanda when the genocide started. 

She has been Royal Television Society Journalist of the Year, and has won the Charles Wheeler Award and the James Cameron Award as well as the Patron’s Medal from the Royal Geographical Society, and recognition from One World Media, Amnesty International and BAFTA. Her writing regularly features in the New York Review of Books, the Sunday Times, the Guardian and Granta, among other publications. Before becoming a journalist, she was an aid worker, first in Latin America and then in Africa. Her first book was Sandstorm; Libya in the Time of Revolution.

Yasir Mirza is Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion for the Financial Times. Mirza joined in June 2021 and is responsible for developing and driving the FT’s D&I strategy.

Prior to the FT, Mirza worked at BBC Studios where he developed their diversity and inclusion strategy and launched their inclusion advocates network. Before that, Yasir was responsible for moving Channel 4 from 147th to 35th in Stonewall’s Top 100 Index. He was also responsible for conceiving and launching the Guardian’s Citizen Reporting Programme, working with marginalised people from around the world to amplify their voices, helping to find more diverse and unheard stories.

Andrea Thompson is Editor in Chief at Marie Claire UK and was recently named by We are the City as one of the UKs top 50 trailblazers for her work highlighting the impact of Covid on gender equality. 

Andrea has worked as a senior journalist for a range of publications over her 20 year career including The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, Channel 4, Glamour and Grazia. At Marie Claire Andrea is passionate about telling the stories of those often marginalised by the mainstream media and oversaw a feature about rape in the Congo that won the title an Amnesty Media Award. She also champions women’s empowerment, sustainability and diversity and regularly chairs panels and speaks at events about these topics. She sits on the committee of the British Society of Magazine Editors where she acts as Vice Chair and looks after diversity and Inclusion, and events. She regularly mentors young women from underr-represented communities trying to break into the media industry.

Ndu Okoh has been editor in chief at Bird News Agency (Africa No Filter) since November 2022 and in this role oversees all aspects of the agency’s editorial output and works with more than 80 contributing journalists across Africa. An award-winning Nigerian journalist, Okoh has a wealth of experience from a varied background that spans broadcast journalism, corporate communications, research and business development. Okoh has held positions in top regional and global news and media houses including Agence France Presse, The Nation Media Group and The Standard Group.

Award-winning freelance journalist, producer and presenter. Working mostly on contemporary political and social documentaries or videos, as well as writing profiles and features.  Iman has previously worked with The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, Vogue Portugal, The Independent, The New Statesman, Square Mile, Raconteur (business supplement distributed in The Times), Huffington Post and Copa90. Guest/commentator on The Russell Howard Hour, BBC Two, BBC Radio 5 Live, Al Jazeera, Africa News, House of Lords, Tedx Glasgow, Chatham House among others.

Areas that Iman has previously covered include violence, police brutality and the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Europe, as well as the Grenfell tragedy. Beyond Europe she has covered the erupting volcano in Guatemala in 2018, narco tourism in Colombia, and Western Sahara’s refugee camps. Working on both sides of the camera – presenting, producing, shooting and editing – means that Iman is often fully involved in the projects she works on, from conception to completion.

In 2017, Juleyka founded a production company, Lantigua Williams & Co., after 18+ years in media (NPR, The Atlantic, Random House). Its mission is to support and amplify the work of creators of color in digital audio and film. Juleyka’s work as a multimedia journalist reached tens millions of people and appeared in The Houston Chronicle,The Miami Herald, The Chicago Tribune, and the L.A. Times, among dozens of national and local papers, and publications like JET, The Progressive, and Nieman Reports. Juleyka earned a masters in print journalism from Boston University and an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College. A Fulbright Scholar (Spain) and John Jay/Tow 2016 Criminal Justice Reporting Fellow, she volunteers as the communications director for TEDxFulbright. Lantigua-Williams has made inclusion a central theme in her life’s work, while endeavoring to fully understand her own experiences as a hyphenated American.

Stephen Titherington is the former Senior Commissioning Editor at the BBC World Service leading editorial projects and creating new programme formats, podcasts and partnerships. New shows include The Assassination; Trending, the Food Chain and The Inquiry – and BBC MINUTE. He has also been Executive Editor of Global News, Deputy Head of WS News Programmes and Head of the World Service Newsroom, where he led coverage of 9-ll and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has led teams covering major news events in the USA, Russia and China and has reported from around the world from Haiti to Hong Kong.

Based in Sarajevo, Miranda Patrucic joined OCCRP in 2006 and is the deputy editor in chief for regional stories and Central Asia. She oversees regional editors around the world and our work in Central Asia.

She worked on the award-winning Plunder and Patronage in the Heart of Central Asia and The Matraimov Kingdom series of stories, which led to protests that eventually brought down a government in Kyrgyzstan. She has also worked on investigations that exposed billions in telecom bribes in Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan; uncovered hidden assets of Azerbaijan’s and Montenegro’s ruling elites; and revealed a €1.2 billion arms trade between Europe and the Gulf, which fueled conflicts in the Middle East.

She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and worked on the Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers, and the FinCEN Files.

Jason Burke is the Africa correspondent of the Guardian, based in Johannesburg. In 20 years as a foreign correspondent, he has covered stories throughout the Middle East, Europe and South Asia. He has written extensively on Islamic extremism and covered the wars of 2001 in Afghanistan and 2003 in Iraq. He is the author of four books, most recently The New Threat.

Portia Ladrido is a multimedia journalist specialising in social justice, culture, and the arts. She is a human rights journalism fellow at the Philippine Human Rights Information Center, the lead convener of the Solutions Journalism hub in the Philippines, and a co-Founder of international media platform INKLINE. She also writes speeches for the Philippines’ first female democratic socialist senator. Previously, she worked as an editor and writer at CNN Philippines, focusing on social issues in the Philippines and across Southeast Asia.

Portia holds a Master’s Degree in International Journalism from Cardiff University, UK.

Claire Cozens is managing editor of The Fuller Project, a global non-profit newsroom focused on issues that affect women and girls. She has extensive experience in international journalism, both as a reporter and as an editor, and a deep interest in shining a light on underreported issues.

As senior editor with the Thomson Reuters Foundation for nearly four years, Claire commissioned and edited enterprise and investigative stories on issues that disproportionately affect marginalised communities around the world, from modern slavery to climate change.

Before that, she worked for more than a decade for the AFP newswire, taking in postings in New Delhi, Beijing, Hong Kong and Kathmandu. As AFP’s news editor for South Asia, she led a multimedia team of journalists, driving coverage of stories ranging from the rise of Hindu nationalism in India to China’s growing regional influence. She also led on-the-ground coverage of the Nepal earthquake and the Rohingya refugee crisis in Bangladesh.

Campbell MacDiarmid is a New Zealand freelance journalist currently living in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan, and is a Middle East correspondent for the Telegraph. As a multimedia journalist he has reported from Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan filing for outlets including Foreign Policy, Daily Telegraph, the Economist, Al Jazeera and others.  Previously he was Assistant foreign editor at The National and Deputy Managing Editor at The Daily News Egypt. He has a legal background and is a Global Journalism Fellow at the Munk School, University of Toronto. 

Aloke Devichand is an Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated commissioner and executive producer. Currently he is working with London-based production companies Mindhouse and Rogan Productions, where he’s overseeing ambitious documentary films and series for global streaming platforms. Before returning to London last year, he spent over a decade working in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore. During this time, he led and grew from nascency Netflix’s original documentary slate across Asia, and worked as a global commissioner for the Witness strand on Al Jazeera English. Earlier in his career he worked as a planning producer at CNN International and was part of the launch team for Webby-winning digital platform, AJ+.

Runako Celina is an Investigative Journalist & documentary filmmaker currently working for the BBC World Service. She holds an MA in Investigative Journalism from City University & an MA in International Politics and African Studies from Peking University. In 2020 she co-founded the award-winning media platform, Black Livity China, to document the experiences of Africans and people of African descent in China and in relation to China.

Georgie Yukiko is a Japanese-British documentary filmmaker and producer at Netflix. Her previous roles include Producer/Director at Geeks In Motion and Podcast Producer & Host at Paturder Productions. Across her career she has been passionate about bridging intersections and re-centering marginalised voices into their own stories, especially within the East Asian community. She brings an unbridled multi-disciplinary approach inspired by a diverse background in theatre, television and film.

Viktorija runs the digital channels for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. She created several podcasts and runs live streaming for the EBRD. She served for two years in Afghanistan as a civilian consultant for NATO training journalists across the country, and running a radio station in Kabul, as well as overseeing media training with several Afghan ministries. She spent several years as a writer, radio producer and programme and planning editor for news and current affairs at the BBC Russian Service in London and Moscow.

Evelyn Wambui is a Regional Media and Communications Specialist for the Middle East, East and Southern Africa at Plan International, with 10+ years progressive experience in media and communications work having worked for both media and NGO communications. Wambui’s work has focused on stories of hunger, poverty, traditional harmful practices as child early and forced marriage, teenage pregnancies, gender based violence (GBV) and child labour in numerous countries including Kenya, South Sudan, Zambia and Mozambique. Previously she has worked as a producer and host at The Human Interest Podcast, senior features reporter at Royal Media Services, and Features Reporter at The Standard Group.

Shiva Dustdar is the Director and Head of the European Investment Bank Institute and the first woman to lead this key pillar of the EIB Group’s community and citizen engagement. A Luxembourg national, Ms Dustdar has over 28 years of experience in the financial industry working for large private and public institutions in New York, London and Luxembourg. Since joining the EIB in 2003, she has worked in risk management, lending, investing and advising in innovative companies.

Before taking on her new position, she led the EIB’s Innovation Finance Advisory (IFA) Division, which she built and scaled up into a successful innovation financing advisory programme covering green, digital, space, gender-smart and health-related sectors.

Shiva Dustdar started her career in 1993 at JP Morgan Investment Banking in New York, working in mergers and acquisitions, project finance and emerging markets before joining Fitch Rating Agency in 1999 to set up its European High Yield rating business. She holds a BA (Magna cum Laude) in Economics from Columbia University and an Executive MBA from London Business School (LBS).

She is also a regular speaker on innovation and impact financing, gender-smart investing, digital and green financing. She is actively engaged in networks that promote sustainable and mission-oriented financing.

Linda Llulla Gashi, lives and works in Prizren, Kosovo. In 2010 she started working as Project Manager for Dokufest “Schools and Documentaries” project. Through this project she helped to establish film clubs and utilise documentaries as an educational tool in high schools in areas populated by the majority and minority communities. She also ran Documentary film school and is an Executive Producer of 36 documentaries made through the “Future is Here” Documentary Film School where students make short documentaries about human rights and social issues. 

In 2019 she was appointed Executive Director of Dokufest. Fundraising, promotion and project development are her top three priorities as a head of organization. Since she was appointed as Executive Director her focus was monitoring and managing the organization’s annual projects, as well as further development of the festival, which was listed one of the best short film festivals in the world in 2021.

Gaëlle Borgia is a French Malagasy video journalist, born and raised in France. In 2020, Gaëlle won a Pulitzer Prize as part of a New York Times team for an investigative story about the Russian interference in Madagascar’s 2018 presidential elections. Gaëlle is OWM’s 2022 News winner for her story about Madagascar’s underreported famine. 

Michael is currently Deputy News Editor at the Evening Standard, where he helps run the digital and print news operation. Previous to that Michael was Standard’s Associate News Editor and Foreign Editor, responsible for commissioning and editing international coverage from Trump’s shock US election win to the Syria war and everything in between. Michael has also worked for a number of other national titles including The Sunday Telegraph, The Independent and The Times.

Irwin joined The New Humanitarian in 2017, covering stories from across Asia and the Pacific as Asia Editor, before becoming Policy Editor in 2022. He is a multimedia journalist and editor who has lived and reported in Asia since 2009. Before coming to The New Humanitarian, he filed print, radio, and multimedia stories as a freelance correspondent and worked closely with local journalists from around the region. He started out in newspapers covering local and provincial politics in Canada. Irwin is also leading a reporting project exploring locally driven aid in humanitarian crises.

Based in Kyiv, Anna Babinets joined OCCRP in 2015 as a regional editor for Ukraine. She is co-founder and editor-in-chief of the independent investigative agency Slidstvo.Info, an OCCRP member centre. Anna specialises in reporting about corruption in the Ukrainian Army, the security sector, and the gas and oil market. She is a 2019 recipient of the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Courage in Journalism award. She also worked on the Ukrainian segment of the Panama Papers project, which won a 2017 Pulitzer Prize.

Anna was a reporter for the investigative documentary, Killing Pavel, about the murder of Ukrainian journalist Pavel Sheremet. The documentary won the 2017 Investigative Reporters and Editors medal (USA) and the 2018 DIG award (Italy). She was also a member of the YanukovychLeaks team, which analysed more than 25,000 documents found in a lake near the former Ukrainian president’s home in 2014. The team won a Global Shining Light Award from the Global Investigative Journalism Network in 2015.

Wanling Chen is the Programmer for the Taiwan International Documentary Festival.

Andrew has worked in-depth on issues such as the Syrian refugee crisis, e-waste in Ghana, the ongoing blockade of the Gaza strip, the conflict in eastern DR Congo, for which he won the Luis Valutena Humanitarian Photography Award. In 2009 he completed a series on the forgotten Sahrawi people of Western Sahara, for which he was awarded 1st place in the portrait story category of the World Press Photo awards. A follow-up project on the issue of urban refugees was carried out in 8 cities worldwide and resulted in exhibitions in London and New York.

From 2014 Andrew spent four years working on his first feature length documentary “GAZA”, which subsequently premiered at Sundance 2019 and was selected as Ireland’s entry for the Oscars’ Best International Feature Film category at 2020 Academy Awards.

Among numerous honours, McConnell has won two 1st place prizes at the World Press Photo Awards, 4 National Press Photographers Association awards, including the prestigious Best of Show, 2 Sony World Photography Awards, 1st place at the Pictures of the Year International, and 1st place in the Istanbul Photo Awards.  His images have appeared worldwide in publications such as National Geographic, Vanity Fair, Time, New York Times, Der Spiegel, Stern, Le Monde, and the Sunday Times Magazine. He is represented by the one of the world’s leading photographic agencies – Panos Pictures.

Nirmal Puwar is a Reader in the department of Sociology at Goldsmiths University and Co-Director of the Centre for Feminist Research. Puwar has published widely and generated creative methodologies. She has been nominated a British Academy Innovative Fellowship, on ‘Multicultural Experiments in the Civic Life of a Cathedral’, based at Coventry Cathedral (2023-24).

She has a longstanding interest in bodies and space, her book Space Invaders: race, gender and bodies out of place (2004), generated a conceptual frame work for considering the conditions of inclusion within institutions. The project Noise of the Past collaboratively re-figured the global war dead and memory with a post-colonial centre point. She co-led the strand on Space Invading in the Global Grace Grant on Gender and Cultural Equalities. At Goldsmiths, she co-founded the Methods Lab to mutate methods and to stretch the walls of the academy. Live Methods, co-edited with Les Back,  is one of eighteen collections she has co-edited. She has co-curated several exhibitions in the Kingsway Corridor at Goldsmiths, including Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria: Testimonies of Uprooting, Space and Gaze: Conversations with Jean Mohr and Edward Said in Palestine, as well as Migrating Dreams and Nightmares.  

She is currently writing a collection on a One Mile Walk, whilst processing decompositions and recompositions of multiple forms of life, which will be published by Punctum Press.

Photo: Studio Morison

Award-winning filmmaker Dan Edge has produced and directed documentaries from across the world for more than twenty years. His films have explored topics as diverse as the West African Ebola outbreak, the Japanese nuclear disaster, the American prison system, the psychological toll of the Iraq War, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and child soldiers in the Pakistani Taliban.

Documentaries he has directed and produced have earned every major award in broadcast journalism, including Emmys, a Peabody, two Columbia duPont Awards in the United States, two BAFTAs and five Royal Television Society awards in the UK.

Louise Hill is Head of Media Relations at UNICEF UK and runs their News, PR and Corporate Communications Team.  She has worked internationally for over 15 years, leading media teams around the globe during war, famine and natural disaster. She has travelled extensively including producing content during a coup in the Central African Republic, from Bangladesh’s largest brothel and working as a journalist in Tamil Nadu, India.  Previously holding senior Communications roles at Comic Relief and Save the Children she is responsible for developing and devising media campaigns which drive significant income and influence within the UK.

Thoko Chikondi is an award-winning Malawian photojournalist who is passionate about telling the stories of women and children through imagery. Her work seeks to highlight their plight and suggest solutions to their problems. In the course of her work, she has exhibited her photographs on New Born Care in Malawi for UNICEF and the Malawi Ministry of Health. In 2015, she spoke at TEDx Lilongwe about her photographs made during the worst floods to have hit Malawi in over three decades. In September 2016 she received a Gender Links award for her photographs on empowering women in and through the media in the SADC region. In the same year, Thoko was among 12 African Photographers selected to attend the World Press Photo East Africa master class, held in Nairobi Kenya.

Inspired by her journey, she established the Thoko Chikondi scholarship targeting disadvantaged young people who have no one to sponsor their education in Malawi Community Day Secondary Schools. She is currently a part-time photojournalist lecturer and corresponds for Associated Press.

Lesedi Mogoatlhe is the Editorial Director of Radio Workshop. Lesedi most recently worked with LGBTI organisations across southern Africa to develop their own podcasts. Her team have trained and mentored African storytellers, journalists, and creatives to develop a wide range of podcasting production and business skills. Lesedi also has a background in documentary filmmaking, having worked in the South African TV and Film industry for almost 20 years. She holds an MA in Documentary Filmmaking from Sussex University.

Wanling is a programmer and translator in Taiwan. Wanling holds an MA in Film and Screen Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London. She was a Programme Coordinator for CNEX Chinese Doc Forum (CCDF) in 2012 and 2013 and joined TIDF’s programming team in 2013 where she oversaw the TIDF Competition. She is now a Programmer for TIDF and the Head of Documentary Office at Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute. She is based in Taipei and has been invited as a moderator, a guest speaker, an advisor, a juror, and a decision-maker for various events, workshops and festivals at home and abroad.

Sui-Lee Wee is the Southeast Asia bureau chief for The New York Times. She was part of the team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for public service for coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. Previously, Ms. Wee covered China for a decade, most recently as a correspondent for The Times from 2016 to 2021. She was twice a part of teams that were named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting: in 2021 for the coronavirus pandemic, and in 2020 for stories on the Chinese government’s use of DNA surveillance against the country’s Uyghur Muslim minority.

Ms. Wee has reported on a three-part series exploring the dysfunctions in China’s health care system, which was recognized as a 2019 finalist in the public service category by the Society of Publishers in Asia. Born and raised in Singapore, Ms. Wee started her career in the city-state with Reuters in 2006. She later worked for the news agency in Hong Kong and Beijing for eight years. She was part of a team that won an Overseas Press Club award in 2016 for “The Long Arm of China,” a series that looked at China’s efforts to extend its influence across its borders.

Carlos Dada is the co-founder and director of the Salvadoran digital news outlet El Faro (“The Lighthouse”), known as the first digital-only news site in Latin America. Dada is the winner of the ICFJ Knight Trailblazer Award for 2022 in recognition of his hard-hitting investigative reporting, lyrical writing and visionary leadership.

He has reported from various conflict zones including Iraq, Venezuela, Mexico, Guatemala and, most recently, Honduras and Nicaragua. He spent years researching war crimes, including the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero. He has also reported on drug trafficking, migration and environmental issues in Central America.

Malek Khadhraoui is a journalist, trainer, and publication director of Inkyfada, a Tunisian magazine dedicated to investigative and long-form journalism. He is also Executive Director of Al Khatt, a nonprofit organization which supports independent journalism and provides solutions for creating impactful journalistic content.

MEE’s head of production, an award-winning documentary film producer and director who has a keen interest in investigations on human rights issues affecting communities from the Middle East. Director of MEE’s first documentary “The Exiles”, which covers the story of Five Egyptian activists from different backgrounds and political ideologies in Tahrir Square.

In 2020, he was the producer of the award-winning short investigation “The Weapon’s power”, which documents the sending of dozens of weapons manufactured in the UAE and Turkey to the two warring parties in Libya, in violation of UN resolutions that prohibit the supply of weapons to Libya. He has also directed the long feature investigation “The looted wealth” and in 2017 was the executive producer and director for the multiple-award-winning investigation “the End User”. The film revealed how weapons being used in the war in Yemen had been supplied by the UK and the US, among others, in an apparent abuse of international laws and trade agreements.

André Uzêda is a journalist and holds a master’s degree in Communication and Contemporary Culture from the Federal University of Bahia. Before becoming a senior editor at The Intercept, he worked at Jornal A Tarde, was a correspondent for Folha de S. Paulo, editor for TV Aratu (an SBT affiliate), TV Bahia (a Globo affiliate), was a columnist for Jornal Correio and editor-in-chief of the Metropole Group. He has had reports published on BBC Brasil, O Globo, Valor, Repórter Brasil, Impedimento and UOL.

Naza Alakija is an Iranian humanitarian and the Founder & CEO of Evoca Foundation, an NGO which works across the pillars of climate action, education and supporting women and girls. Naza advocates for girls’ and young women’s access to education and funds innovative grassroots movements that deliver holistic solutions to the climate crisis and build equitable futures for all. Naza is a Senior Adviser to UNICEF and a number of other leading global institutions.

Mariel Lozada is the Digital Content Manager at the solutions journalism site Reasons to be Cheerful. She holds a Master’s Degree in Engagement Journalism from the City University of New York and was a 2021 fellow of the Foreign Press Correspondents Association. She acts as Assistant Spanish Editor for the Global Investigative Journalism Network. She also works with several publications and organizations in Latin America, like La Tercera (Chile), Efecto Cocuyo (Venezuela), Salud con Lupa (Perú) and more, reporting on gender, health and immigration. Her work explores the relationship between journalism and technology, and she focuses on how to improve the relationship with the audience. She was certified as a Media Consultant thanks to a scholarship from Sembramedia. 

Dan Aceda is a Kenyan-born maker, imagineer and thought leader who has worked across multiple industries. Dan brings 20 years of content making experience in Arica coupled with 8 years work in tech and tech for development. Dan runs the podcast incubator SemaBOX which is a plug and play enabler facility based in Nairobi for small and micro creators. SemaBOX is currently Africa’s largest podcast incubator by volume with a global audience of more than 65 million people annually and 230 titles.

Ladan Anoushfar is a multi-award-winning documentary filmmaker who has produced, directed, and edited films for BBC World, Al Jazeera, CNN and the Aga Khan Architecture Awards. She is currently the Senior Video Producer of As Equals, CNN’s award-winning series reporting on systemic gender inequalities with stories on underreported issues in underreported parts of the world, told by underrepresented voices.

After studying at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art in London, Ladan trained with cinema legend Abbas Kiarostami and double Oscar winner Asghar Farhadi in Iran where some of her feature film projects are set. Ladan Anoushfar also co-founded Black Leaf Films in 2018, an independent production company that works on delivering films and series for platforms such as Al Jazeera English and Channel 4 News. Prior to this, she has worked as a freelance editor and producer for BBC World Service and Al Jazeera English’s Witness programme.

Yashi Paswan is a co-founder and producer at Dot Films, an international production house based in India. In this role she has worked on projects with Artgrid, Storyblocks, River, St. Regis, ITC Hotels, and Mindtree. Starting out as a copywriter, Paswan believes in the emotional and intellectual impact of storytelling, and she co-founded Dot Films to promote creative collaboration and cultural analysis through visual storytelling.