Speakers

Martha Little is Senior Director of Creative Development at Audible, where she and her team has worked with talent ranging from Martin Sheen to Steph Curry to Queen Latifah. Her twenty-five-year career was built at major American public radio outlets: NPR (Day to Day, All Things Considered), APM (Marketplace), PRI (America Abroad, Studio 360) News Director at WBUR. Her work has been recognized by such awards as The Peabody, The Gracie, and Edward R. Murrow.    

Martha played a critical role in creating and executing Audible’s Podcast Development Program. The program offers development, audio production, writing, and marketing support to a selected group of talented storytellers from around the world. She manages Audible’s investigative documentaries, docudramas, fiction, and non-fiction series.    

Martha serves on the Board of The Podcast Academy, the host of the Ambie Awards.

Saad Mohseni, co-founder and Chairman of MOBY Group, has brought top tier news and media content to emerging and frontier markets over the past two decades.

Named an Asia Game Changer by the Asia Society “for bringing news, information and entertainment to a barren landscape,” Mr. Mohseni launched his first network in Afghanistan in 2002, and has developed MOBY Group into one of the fastest growing diversified media companies in South and Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa. In 2012, 21st Century Fox became a strategic minority shareholder in the Group for 7 years. The Mohseni family assumed full control of MOBY Group following Disney’s acquisition of Fox.

MOBY Group has received several awards in recognition of its quality content and its activities span radio and TV broadcast, digital and online, creative solutions and strategic communications.

Awards for Mr. Mohseni include Time magazine’s 2011 ranking of “100 most influential people in the world”, Foreign Policy’s 2013 “100 Global Thinkers” and the Business Insider’s 2016 “100 Creators List”. The work his news and television networks have done in Afghanistan for empowering civil society and defending women’s rights earned him a place in the BBC’s 2015 ranking of the “10 Men Globally Championing Gender Equality”.

Mr. Mohseni serves on the Advisory Board of the International Crisis Group and is a member of the International Advisor Council for the Middle East Institute (MEI). He spent 2 years on the board of the International Center for Journalists.

Jon Lee Anderson is an internationally recognised journalist, author, and war correspondent. He began his reporting career in the early 1980s, chronicling Central America’s civil wars for TIME magazine and other journals. As a New Yorker staff writer since 1998, he has covered numerous international conflicts, including those in Syria, Ukraine, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, Angola, Mali, Liberia, and Central African Republic. Anderson’s work has also appeared The New York Times, Harper’s, El Pais, Internazionale, The Financial Times, and other publications.

Jon Lee has also written about well-known contemporary figures, such as Gabriel García Márquez, Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, Augusto Pinochet, Spain’s King Juan Carlos, and Saddam Hussein. He is the author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, Guerrillas: Journeys in the Insurgent World, The Fall of Baghdad, and several other books. He has won a number of awards and distinctions, including several from the Overseas Press Club, as well as the Maria Moors Cabot Gold Medal for his reporting on Latin America

Jon Lee is on a number of journalism award juries, including the Swiss-based True Story Award, the Michael Jacobs Travel Writing Fund, and as a member of the board of directors of the Fundación Gabo (formerly New Journalism Foundation), founded by Gabriel García Márquez, he helps choose winners for the annual Premios Gabo. Once a year, he gives workshops to young Latin American reporters.

Rania Abouzeid is a Beirut-based print and television journalist and is the author of No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria, as well as Sisters of the War:Two Remarkable True Stories of Survival and Hope in Syria. 

A multi award-winning journalist, her work has been published in The New Yorker, Time Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times and many other outlets. 

Her first book, No Turning Back, won The Overseas Press Club of America’s Cornelius Ryan Book Award for the best book on international affairs, and was a finalist for five other awards, among numerous honors, including being selected as a NYT Notable Book of 2018 and a Financial Times Best Book of the Year. No Turning Back was nominated for NYU Journalism’s Top 10 Works of Journalism of the Decade, while GQ Magazine named it one of The 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century. 

Rania is the recipient of several fellowships including from the European Council on Foreign Relations, New America, and most recently Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

Jane Lytvynenko is widely recognized as an industry leader in disinformation research and reporting. She is a freelance reporter. Previously, she was a senior research fellow with the Tech and Social Change project at Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center. There, she helped shape research for the Media Manipulation Casebook and train newsrooms and academics in investigating online disinformation. Previously, she spent nearly five years at BuzzFeed News where she was a senior reporter on the technology team. At BuzzFeed, she focused on the rise of conspiracy theories, hyperpartisan news, cryptocurrency scams, and extremism globally. During breaking news situations, Jane brought swift and accessible debunks to global audiences across mediums, including video, print, and social media. Her byline has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Atlantic, MIT Tech Review, and others. 

Her investigative work has uncovered a secretive extremist organization operating in the US, disinformation network operators who manipulate social media on behalf of state actors, and online hucksters seeking to scam people out of their livelihoods. Presently, her journalism is focused on the war on Ukraine. 

Jane has also shown how the online world can impact people offline and how politicians frequently profit from the disinformation environment. In 2020, Jane won the prestigious Emerging Excellence award. The Digital Publishing Award jury called her “a global leader in debunking disinformation” and noted her for the “impact on global media and ability to lead and train others in this important field.” 

Peter Pomerantsev is a widely published author and one of the most important global thinkers when it comes to the war in Ukraine and its global implications. Peter is currently a Research Fellow at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, but you will have seen his name on pages of the Financial Times, Time magazine, and the Atlantic to name just a few.

Earlier this year, he won the European Press Prize for his extraordinary essay on the importance of new, connected global narratives. Peter is an influential voice among Western policymakers. He has testified on the challenges of information war to the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the UK Parliament Defense Select Committee. His book on Russian propaganda, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, won the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, was nominated for the Samuel Johnson, Guardian First Book, Pushkin House, and Gordon Burns Prizes. It is translated into over a dozen languages. His latest book is This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality.

Yaroslav Trofimov is the 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist, Ukrainian-born Italian author, and journalist who serves as a chief foreign-affairs correspondent at The Wall Street Journal.

Yaroslav’s extraordinary coverage of the Ukraine war has won him international acclaim. Months before landing in Ukraine, Yaroslav covered the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Yaroslav has received numerous awards for his work, including the Gold Medal of the Washington Institute Book Prize. He was also listed for the Lettre Ulysses Award for literary journalism and was a finalist for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers award. His upcoming novel will be about Ukraine.

Natalia Antelava is a Georgian journalist, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the award-winning newsroom Coda Story, and co-founding member of ZEG Festival. Coda, a digital newsroom that reports on roots of global crises, has covered many of the themes that are currently shaping the Ukraine war, and during the first weeks of invasion Coda’s narrative journalism, quoted by newsrooms such as the New York Times and CNN, provided important context to the mainstream coverage of the news.

Before founding Coda, Natalia was a BBC resident correspondent in the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East, and the United States. She has covered Russia’s invasion of Georgia and its first invasion of Ukraine and has reported on conflicts in Africa and the Middle East. Her undercover investigations into human rights abuses in Iraq, Yemen, the United States, and India have won her a number of awards and an Emmy nomination.

Andrew North is an award-winning British journalist currently writing a book on Afghanistan and the Taliban’s return to power. He has spent much of his career reporting from Afghanistan and Iraq, including many years based in both countries for the BBC. Andrew has reported widely from other conflict zones, including Libya, Syria, Pakistan and Kosovo, and he covered Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008. You can find him on Twitter @NorthAndrew and Instagram @SketchyReports.

Rachel Corp is CEO of ITN, which produces news for the UK’s main commercial broadcasters, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, as well as varied TV and digital content for a range of UK and international clients. Previously, she was the Editor of  ITV News, responsible for the vision, strategy and direction for all of ITV’s award-winning national news programmes and digital output, as well as overseeing ITV News London, ITV News-produced Tonight programme episodes, international current affairs series On Assignment, and special live programmes such as General Elections and Royal events.

Under her leadership ITV News won a number of awards for domestic and foreign coverage, including Bafta, International Emmy and Royal Television Society awards. Rachel led the channel's deployment and extraordinary coverage of the Ukraine war. Previously, she was Editor of 5 News and ITV London, worked as BBC’s Senior Moscow Producer and as a Head of Channels at digital production company WebsEdge.

Oleksiy Matsuka is a Ukrainian journalist from Donetsk. He is the editor-in-chief of the Ukrainian foreign broadcasting TV channel FREEDOM which broadcasts to audiences in Russian and NGCA. Previously he was an editor of Novosti Donbasa (News of Donbas), a Donbas news website which focused on investigating public officials since 2007 in Donetsk city. He has also reported on Donetsk for Hromadske.TV and for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Ukrainian Service. In 2011, Matsuka’s apartment was set on fire after he published a series of articles on the embezzlement of public funds in Donetsk. In April 2014, his car was set on fire after he wrote an article titled “Russia’s deep ties to Donetsk’s Kremlin collaborators.” In April 2014, Reporters Without Borders named Matsuka in its list of 100 Information Heroes. In December 2014, the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression presented him with its International Press Freedom Award.

Catalina Gómez Angel is a print and broadcast journalist based in Tehran specialized in the Middle East and Iran politics, social issues and cultural affairs. In the past decade she has covered some of the most important events in the region, including the 2009 protest in Iran, the Syria war, the fall-out of the Syrian war in Lebanon, the war against Isis in Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan. Lately she has been mostly in Ukraine.    

Catalina is the winner of the Simon Bolivar prize of journalism in 2017 and the CPB (The Association of Journalists of Bogotá) prize as Best Foreign Correspondent in Colombia for the coverage of Syria and Iraq.  

Andrey Boborykin is the executive director of Ukrainska Pravda, one of Ukraine’s most well-read and visited news websites nationwide.  

Aside from steering the operational side of the newsroom, Andrey is a member of local news emergency fund Media Development Foundation, which fundraises and raises awareness to increase support for the local independent news publishers in Ukraine. In addition, Andrey has written extensively about the role of Big Tech in fueling the Russian propaganda machine.

Volodymyr Yermolenko, Ph.D., is a Ukrainian philosopher, journalist, and book writer. He works as an analytics director at Internews Ukraine, a chief editor at UkraineWorld.org (a multimedia project in English focused on Ukraine), and as an associate professor at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.  Volodymyr is also the editor of the essay collection “Ukraine in Histories and Stories.”    

Volodymyr received the Sheveliov Prize for best Ukrainian essays book in 2018, the Petro Mohyla Prize in 2021, and the Book of the Year prize in several nominations in 2018 and 2015.

Polina Ivanova is a foreign correspondent at the Financial Times covering Russia and Ukraine. After reporting from Kyiv on the start of Russia's invasion, she has spent the subsequent months covering the war with a focus on Russia, from the Kremlin's crackdown to the effect of sanctions and attempts to evade them. She was shortlisted this year for the George Orwell Prize for Political Journalism for her coverage of Russia's political climate in the run up to the invasion.

Dr. Anna Neistat leads The Docket – an initiative at the Clooney Foundation for Justice, focused on accountability for perpetrators and enablers of international crimes. Anya leads CFJ’s work on Ukraine, focused on investigating and seeking accountability for war crimes committed in the country.

Neistat has been involved in international human rights work for more than two decades. Before joining CFJ, she was Amnesty International’s Senior Director for Research, responsible for leading the organization’s global research agenda and crisis response.    

Previously, Neistat worked as associate director for Program and Emergencies at Human Rights Watch. She led fact-finding missions in conflict areas and was responsible for developing investigative methodology and training. Neistat has conducted over 60 investigations in conflict areas around the world, including Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, Zimbabwe, Nepal, Kenya, Yemen, Chechnya, Sri Lanka and Uzbekistan.    

Neistat is the Chair of the Board at Crisis Action, an international organization working with global civil society to protect civilians from armed conflict. She holds an LL.M. degree from Harvard Law School, a J.D. and Ph.D. in law, and an M.S. in history and philology. She has authored numerous reports and opinion pieces, and regularly contributes to legal and human rights debates in academic and policy institutions. Neistat’s work has been profiled in the media and in the award-winning documentary, E-team.

Khushbu Shah is Rest of World’s Editorial Director. Previously, she led newsrooms and bureaus for a start-up award-winning global newsroom and NPR’s Georgia Public Broadcasting. While at CNN, she has produced, reported and managed coverage on the ground across Latin America, the US and Asia. She has also managed network coverage out of Syria and Ukraine. She has produced, written and edited work on the ground from the Middle East, Latin America, Europe, Asia and the U.S.

Khushbu has launched and led more than two dozen newsroom partnerships while leading an award-winning global newsroom start-up with The New York Times, AP and The Guardian, among dozens of other publications, including a TIME magazine cover with an all-women Afghan newsroom.

She began her career in Kabul, Afghanistan where she spent two years at Moby Media Group, the parent company of TOLO News. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, The Guardian, Washington Post, Businessweek, and elsewhere. Khushbu holds a MSc from the London School of Economics in Comparative Politics and a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. She is an advisor to Report for the World and a yet-to-be named effort to support Afghan newsrooms in exile. She is a CFR Term Member. Khushbu is also a member of the Asian American Journalists Association and a member of the South Asian Journalists Association.

Michael Zelenko is a New York City-based journalist and the deputy editor of Rest of World, an award-winning nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering the impact of technology outside the West. Launched in 2021, Rest of World’s global newsroom stretches from Jakarta to Mexico City.

Previously, Michael co-founded and served as the executive editor of OneZero, a tech and science outlet underwritten by Medium. For nearly half a decade prior, he led the award-winning longford and features program at The Verge, where he also established an enterprise reporting team responsible for groundbreaking investigative work. He also spearheaded and managed The Verge’s partnership with organizations including Type Investigations and the Marshall Project.

Born in Russia and raised in the US, Michael has also reported from countries such as Colombia and Iceland for various outlets.

Kerry Paterson is deputy director of emergencies at the Committee to Protect Journalists. She helps guide CPJ’s emergency assistance and journalist safety work worldwide and to shape CPJ’s response to crises. She is an advocacy and communications specialist.

Before joining the emergency department, Kerry served as deputy director of advocacy and communications at CPJ. Before joining CPJ, Paterson worked with the Initiative for Conflict-Related Trauma, Médecins Sans Frontières, the Women’s Media Center’s Women Under Siege Project, and the Massachusetts General Hospital’s Division of Global Health and Human Rights.

Kerry has also engaged in human rights-related work and research in East and Central Africa and the Balkans.

Nino Japiashvili is the Managing Editor of the Georgian Bureau of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). She has more than 25 years of experience working as a journalist, editor and producer at independent online and television outlets.  She has anchored and later produced several programs on independent Rustavi 2 Television, before that she was working at the Georgian Public  Broadcaster, prior to moving to print and online media as the editor-in-chief of the “Tskheli Shokoladi” Magazine, and, later, as the executive editor of the Liberali Magazine. In 2015, Japiashvili co-founded Indigo, an award-winning publication, and a web platform.  Nino Japiashvili is a trainer and lecturer of media ethics and multimedia reporting. She is on faculty at the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs, Caucasus School of Journalism and Media Management. She has been elected to serve as a board member of the Charter of Journalistic Ethics of Georgia in 2020 and 2015.

Andrey Shary is a Russian journalist and non-fiction author. Educated in Moscow, he joined the Russian Service of U.S. funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in 1992, right after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Shary covered dramatic events in former Yugoslavia in 1993-1996 as a field reporter based in Zagreb. Then he moved to RFE/RL’ headquarters in Prague to pursue further career as writer and radio host. For the last six years he heads Radio Svoboda, currently the loudest independent Russian-speaking voice which openly confronts the Kremlin’s political censorship and persecution of journalists.

Shary debuted as a writer in 2002 and since then has authored and co-authored 15 non-fiction books, focused primarily on Yugoslavian conflict, history and current affairs of Central and South-Eastern Europe, as well as the history of world mass-culture. He also writes travelogs. His latest includes Czech Time: Great History of a Small Nation (2022). His books and texts are translated into English, Czech, Romanian, Ukrainian, Polish. Shary lives in Prague.

Natalie Sedletska is a Kyiv-based investigative reporter and managing editor of the «Schemes» - an investigative project of the RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service, established after the Revolution of Dignity in 2014. The «Schemes» team led by Natalie is known for exposing high-level political corruption, abuse of power by Ukrainian authorities, and hidden Russian influence on Ukrainian politics and economics.

In 2021 Natalie was recognized for her reporting and received the Transatlantic Leadership Network's inaugural "Freedom of the Media" award. In 2019 Sedletska was selected for the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. In 2017 she was awarded the "Light of Justice" Award for "Moral and Spiritual Leadership in Ukraine". In 2015 Natalie went undercover as part of a British Channel 4 television documentary, "From Russia With Cash". The film became an important element of the recent anti-money laundering campaign in the UK. In 2014 Natalie also participated as an investigator in the YanukovychLeaks project - when a group of journalists and volunteers rescued from a lake, dried and analyzed 200 folders of documents that shed light on the scale of corruption of Ukrainian ex-president Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia in the result of Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine. The project was awarded the Global Shining Light Award in Norway in 2015 - an international award in the field of investigative journalism. In 2013-2014, Sedletska was a Vaclav Havel Fellow through a joint program of RFE/RL and the Czech Republic Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Hanna Liubakova is a journalist and researcher from Belarus. She is currently a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council and has written for various outlets, such as the Washington Post, the Economist, and Gazeta Wyborcza. As a journalism trainer and mentor, she trained media professionals in Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, and Poland in solutions journalism.

Hanna started her career at the only independent Belarusian TV channel based in Warsaw, where she worked as a correspondent and TV presenter. Hanna has reported from various countries and regions, including Belarus, Poland, the UK, France, and Chechnya. She was a recipient of the Václav Havel Journalism Fellowship at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Czechia and a World Press Institute Fellowship in the United States. Hanna received a bachelor’s degree in Art History from The Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, in 2010 and a Master of Art with distinction in International Journalism from Brunel University in London in 2017. She was awarded the Peter Caws Prize for best postgraduate dissertation.

Justyna Mielnikiewicz is an award-winning photographer from Poland, based in Tbilisi, Georgia since 2003. Her work has been published in international titles including the Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, Newsweek, Le Monde, Stern, and The New York Times, among others. She is a winner of the World Press Photo, Canon Female Photojournalist Prize, Caucasus Young Photographer Award by Magnum Foundation, Aftermath Project Grant and Eugene Smith Fund in 2016.The most important part of her work is devoted to personal, long-term projects published as books. In 2014, her first book was published: Woman with a Monkey: Caucasus in Short Notes and Photographs. In 2019, the author’s second book, Ukraine Runs Through It, was shortlisted among the “20 best books” by Paris Photo and Aperture. Mielnikiewicz also contributed to Relentless Courage: Ukraine and the World at War, documenting the Ukraine war, published in October 2022 in the US.

She teaches photography workshops and is available for lectures on the topic she specializes in, which deals with different aspects of transformations in the countries of Central Europe, in particular the Caucasus and Ukraine.