Presenters

Dayo Aiyetan, an investigative reporter, newsroom mentor and media trainer, is the Executive Director of the International Centre for Investigative Reporting, based in Nigeria, which he founded in 2010. He has done major investigative reporting of his own, exposing corruption in a nation where corruption is endemic. But lately, Aiyetan has concentrated on building skills for journalists in newsrooms across Nigeria to undertake critics. Aiyetan is currently a Knight Wallace fellow at the University of Michigan, where he is working on best practices and secure communications for whistle blowers working with investigative journalists.

Sulome Anderson is a journalist and author based between Beirut, Lebanon and New York City. She writes and produces multimedia for NBC, Newsweek, The Atlantic, New York magazine, Esquire, Foreign Policy, Harpers and others. Her award-winning book The Hostage’s Daughter was published with HarperCollins in 2016 and has been optioned for film.

Chitrangada Choudhury is an independent multimedia journalist, and currently, a Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. At the University of Michigan, she is studying the issue of free, prior, informed consent and ecological justice. Previously, she worked at The Indian Express, The Hindustan Times and the Guardian US and has written for Columbia Journalism Review, The Caravan, Economic & Political Weekly, The Hindu and Mint. Her coverage of India has probed power and marginality, and has been named for multiple national and international reporting awards including the Sanksriti Award and the Lorenzo Natali Journalism Prize. Chitrangada has an undergraduate degree in history from St.Stephen’s College, Delhi University, and a masters degree in journalism and international affairs from Columbia University.

Emma Daly is a recovering journalist who helps colleagues at Human Rights Watch to tell stories that will attract media attention and raise the pressure on governments to end abusive policies and improve people’s lives. Before becoming an activist, she spent almost 20 years covering stories of people living through war, abuse or discrimination, mostly in Central America, the former Yugoslavia and Spain. She moved from Reuters to The Independent and ended up with the New York Times, and has contributed to several books, including the Penguin Book of Journalism and Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know.

Travis Fox is the director of Visual Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Fox most recently produced films for FRONTLINE on PBS. From 1999 to 2009, he worked as a senior video journalist at The Washington Post and was widely recognized as a pioneer of online video. In 2006, he won the first Emmy Award for web video for his coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Fox, a FAA-licensed drone pilot, launched CUNY’s first drone journalism course and is currently working on several drone-related projects.

Lonnie Isabel is a journalist, writer and journalism instructor based in New York. He is a distinguished lecturer at Columbia Journalism School. Isabel has focused his career on domestic politics and international reporting at several newspapers, including the Boston Globe and Newsday. He has reported from or trained journalists in a half dozen countries, including Cuba, Jordan and India. During his newspaper career, he has led coverage of several national political campaigns and of the Second Gulf War. He was the editor of several prize winning series, including Dele Olojede’s report 10 years after Rwanda that won the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches a course in covering human rights at Columbia.

Sara Jamshidi is an award-winning foreign correspondent and publisher of Goltune News, an online news site covering Muslim women’s fashion, lifestyles and leadership. Through Goltune News, she dispels Islamophobia-driven themes in the news media with a peace journalism perspective, focusing on encouraging stories of influential females in communities worldwide who promote positive change.

Lenka Kabrhelova is a foreign correspondent for Czech Radio, the main public broadcasting network in the Czech Republic. She is currently a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. She spent the last four years as a US correspondent, based in Washington, DC. Prior to that she was Czech Radio’s correspondent in Russia and the CIS, an association of former Soviet republics. She has filed radio news stories, features, interviews and longer programs from nearly twenty different countries. Before her foreign correspondent career, she hosted several Czech Radio programs, including its most listened-to daily discussion show. Prior to that, she was a presenter and reporter at Czech Section of the BBC World Service. Kabrhelova received her MA and BA in journalism and media studies at Charles University in Prague.

Rashid Khan is a PhD Scholar and Assistant Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Management and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan. He teaches media ethics and law, television and film production and screenwriting. Khan has served as an advisor for the BS Media and Communication Program and the Head University Broadcasting House and is a member of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) National Curriculum Committee. Khan earned his terminal MA degree in film from University of Wales, UK.  In addition to his contributions to academia, Khan works as a news producer/reporter and assistant/associate producer and director in Pakistan’s entertainment industry.

Gillian Laub is a photographer and filmmaker based in New York. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in comparative literature before studying photography at the International Center of Photography, where her love of visual storytelling began. Laub’s first monograph, Testimony (Aperture), began as a response to the media coverage during the second intifada in the Middle East. This work is comprised of portraits and testimonies from Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, Lebanese, and Palestinians all directly and indirectly affected by the conflict. Laub spent over a decade working in Georgia exploring issues of lingering racism in the American South. This work became Laub’s first feature length, directed and produced, documentary film, Southern Rites that premiered on HBO. Her monograph, Southern Rites (Damiani) and travelling exhibition by the same title are being used for an educational outreach campaign, in schools and institutions across the country.

Adriana Loureiro Fernández is a Venezuelan photojournalist who covers South American Human Rights issues. Her work focuses on migration and violence in non-traditional war zones. She has photographed the Venezuelan-Colombian border, prisons, riots, diasporas. Currently, she is working on a long-term project focusing on Crimes Against Humanity in Venezuela. Her work has been exhibited in New York and most of South America. She won Ian Parry’s Highly Commended award in 2017. In the same year she obtained a Master’s Degree at Columbia University’s School of Journalism.

Jane Onyanga-Omara is a world news reporter and digital editor for USA Today, reporting breaking news around the globe and writing her own in-depth enterprise stories and features. Onyanga-Omara’s work includes reporting extensively on conflicts around the world and the plight of refugees and other marginalized groups.

During Marquita Pool-Eckert’s thirty year career as a CBS News producer, she reported on the Middle East war in Lebanon, famine in Sudan and Ethiopia, a hostage crisis, catastrophes, and news events from eighteen countries as a field producer for CBS Evening News. As a senior producer for CBS Sunday Morning, she oversaw the show’s production, and produced contributor’s segments. Marquita has received eleven Emmy Awards, New York Women in Film and Television’s Muse Award and Columbia Journalism School’s Alumni of the year award in 2002. After retiring from CBS News, she taught broadcast journalism as an adjunct professor at Columbia University School of Journalism, Hunter College, CCNY and CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. She is co-chair of The Friends of Education of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and a former member of The George Foster Peabody Awards Board of Jurors.

Bruce Shapiro is Executive Director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, a project of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism encouraging innovative reporting on violence, conflict and tragedy worldwide. An award-winning reporter on human rights, criminal justice and politics, Shapiro is a contributing editor at The Nation and U.S. correspondent for Late Night Live on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National. He is also Senior Advisor for Academic Affairs at Columbia Journalism School, where he teaches ethics. His books include Shaking the Foundations: 200 Years of Investigative Journalism in America and Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and America’s Future. He is recipient of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Public Advocacy Award for “outstanding and fundamental contributions to the social understanding of trauma.”

Owen Ullmann is an award-winning journalist and author who has covered the White House, foreign affairs, economics and political campaigns for four decades. Currently USA TODAY’s Managing Editor for World News, he has reported from all 50 states and more than 60 countries, and has interviewed five U.S. presidents, numerous foreign leaders and other major political and economic decision-makers. Washingtonian magazine rated him among the “50 most influential journalists” and the White House Correspondents Association has twice honored him for his reporting. Owen received his master’s degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which has twice honored him with awards for distinguished journalism. He is on the Board of Advisers for the University’s Center for Journalism Ethics.