Aaron Rasmussen is an entrepreneur, inventor, and game designer. He’s best known as a founder of educational platforms MasterClass and Outlier.org, the latter known for creating impactful for-credit online college courses to promote affordable, equitable education. At MasterClass, Rasmussen was both Creative Director and CTO, creating courses taught by notable experts and directing many himself.

He previously founded and sold an industrial robotics company and a beverage company. The video game he co-wrote, BlindSide, has won multiple awards and is being adapted into a film. He speaks and writes on education, innovation, art, and the intersection of all with artificial intelligence.

Adam Faze is the founder of Gymnasium and the creative producer behind some of the most popular short-form series on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, including Girl Room (Owen Thiele), Boy Room (Rachel Coster), and Keep The Meter Running (Kareem Rahma). His work has been viewed over 1 billion times and has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times, GQ, and The Guardian.

Adam was also a producer of iShowSpeed’s “Speed Does America,” a 35-day 24/7 live stream tour of the United States. Before moving into digital series, Adam spent nearly a decade in Hollywood working for film and TV producers like Annapurna Pictures (Zero Dark Thirty, American Hustle). The Hollywood Reporter recently named him one of the “50 Most Influential Influencers.”

Aïda Delpuech is an opera singer and a journalist. She has worked for the independent Tunisian media outlet Inkyfada and for the investigative network Forbidden Stories. Their Gaza Project, a collaborative investigation conducted with 13 media organizations around the world, demonstrated the targeting of journalists in Gaza. She now contributes freelance pieces to independent French media such as Blast, Mediapart and Le Monde Diplomatique. She was a finalist for the True Story Award in 2024.

Alix Dunn is a trusted expert, advisor, and facilitator who has shaped the field of public interest technology and worked on the issues of society and technology for 15 years.
She is the founder and CEO of The Maybe, a critical consultancy, collective, and media studio that challenges the power and politics of technology. She also hosts the Computer Says Maybe podcast.
Alix serves as a senior advisor for AI Now and the AI Collaborative, and sits on the advisory boards of Foxglove and RealML. She is a former trustee of the Ada Lovelace Institute for AI & Society and program committee member of the board of directors of the Mozilla Foundation. Before setting up The Maybe, Alix co-founded The Engine Room, a global non-profit that supports activist organizations in incorporating technology into their work.

Armando Iannucci is a writer, director, and broadcaster whose critically acclaimed work spans television, film, radio, and stage. In 2005, Iannucci created the BBC series 'The Thick of It'. The show received widespread recognition, earning 13 BAFTA nominations and 5 wins. The success of the series also led to the 2009 film 'In the Loop', which earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Armando then went on to create the HBO series ‘Veep’. The show explored the American political system through the character of Selina Meyer, winning several prestigious awards, including four Emmy Awards for Outstanding Comedy Series.

In 2017 he published 'Hear Me Out', a new book on classical music and released the feature film ‘The Death of Stalin’ which received 2 BAFTA nominations and won Best Comedy at the European Film Awards. In 2019, he directed ‘The Personal History of David Copperfield’, which won Best Screenplay at both the WGBA and BIFA, while also earning a Golden Globe nomination.

Iannucci returned to HBO with ‘Avenue 5’, a sci-fi comedy about a luxury space cruise ship that goes off course, starring Hugh Laurie. The series was nominated for both a Golden Globe and an Emmy.

In 2024, Iannucci adapted Stanley Kubrick's ‘Dr. Strangelove’ for the stage, reimagining the film as a live theatrical production. The stage version received acclaim for its bold take on Kubrick’s political satire and marked Iannucci’s return to working with Steve Coogan, with whom he created the character, Alan Partridge.

Arwa Damon is a five-time Emmy winning former CNN Senior International Correspondent. While her career has taken her across the globe, she is best known for her coverage of the Middle East, especially out of Iraq and Syria, and for the human stories she brings into her reporting. She is also the recipient of numerous Peabody Awards, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for her coverage of the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, and the prestigious Courage in Journalism Award by the International Women’s Media Foundation.

In 2015 Arwa founded her charity, the International Network for Aid, Relief, and Assistance, (INARA), that provides comprehensive holistic medical and mental health care for children impacted by war and natural disasters who otherwise would not be receiving treatment.

In 2022 Arwa parted ways with CNN to direct and produce the award-winning documentary “Seize the Summit” and focus on growing and expanding INARA. She is also a non-resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council.

Bao Nguyen is an award-winning Vietnamese American filmmaker and founding partner of EAST Films, a transpacific production company based in Los Angeles and Vietnam. His work has been seen on HBO, Netflix, The New York Times, and Arte, among others. He directed “Be Water,” an intimate portrait of Bruce Lee that competed in the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, was invited to screen at SXSW, Cannes, Telluride, and Hot Docs, and became the most-watched ESPN 30 for 30 film of all time.

Bao’s feature documentary “The Greatest Night in Pop,” about the making of “We Are the World,” premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, debuted as the number one film globally on Netflix, won the PGA Award and Critics Choice Award, and received a Grammy and Primetime Emmy nomination. He directed the critically acclaimed film, “The Stringer,” which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and was released on Netflix. His most recent film, “BTS: The Return,” which was also released on Netflix, chronicles the world's biggest band, BTS, as they return from military service to record their 5th studio album ARIRANG. The film premiered in the top 10 in 85 countries including reaching the number 1 in 15 countries.

Bao is a member of BAFTA and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a PBS/WGBH Producers Fellow, a Firelight Media Documentary Lab Fellow, a Berlinale Talents alumnus, and a BAFTA US Breakthrough recipient, and holds a BA in Politics/International Relations from NYU and an MFA in Social Documentary Film from the School of Visual Arts.

Brad Barton is a magician and mentalist who combines psychology, comedy, and audience participation to create astonishing performances. For 30 years, he has worked to redefine the "magic show" as a medium for investigating deeper human truths and the intimate connection between a performer and their audience.

Based in San Francisco since 2009, Brad’s career has ranged from performing for the Coppola family and Andrew Garfield to backstage appearances for Phish at Madison Square Garden and Prince’s final shows at the Fillmore.

Whether performing his decade-long sell-out residency at San Francisco’s The Lost Church or his current work, The Gift — which explores resilience and gratitude through the Japanese art of Kintsugi — Brad’s performances center on the shared experience of what is possible. He also (infamously) once stole Tom Waits’ watch.

Branko Brkic is founder of PROJECT KONTINUUM, a global initiative to advance journalism, media innovation, and sustainability.  He is former Editor-in-Chief of Daily Maverick, South Africa’s leading online daily which he co-founded in 2009.  Branko’s career spans 40 years and includes a book publishing house in Yugoslavia, editing a business and tech magazine in South Africa and launching Maverick and Empire magazines.

Chas Edwards is the general manager for Reuters Events, a unit of Thomson Reuters that produces more than 50 annual business conferences and trade shows around the world. Since 2023, his work with Airbnb, CalMatters, CatchLight, Wait What, Walking Cinema, and others has focused on business transformation, product development, and experience design.

From 2012 to 2023, Chas was co-founder, president, and publisher of Pop-Up Magazine Productions, which produced the California Sunday Magazine and the touring show, Pop-Up Magazine, which the New York Times called “a sensation,” and New York Magazine deemed “Highbrow / Brilliant.” Pop-Up Magazine received  17 National Magazine Award nominations, a Pulitzer Prize, a James Beard Award, a Livingston Award, a George Polk Award, two Magazine of the Year Awards from the Society of Publication Designers, and an AI-AP's International Motion Arts Award.

Pop-Up Magazine Productions appeared on Fast Company’s list of World's Most Innovative Companies, Ad Age’s A-List for best event creators in media, and received the Mark Twain Award for Storytelling from the Tribeca Film Festival. Chas Edwards was included in the FOLIO 100 and  Ad Age’s Creativity 50 list.

Prior to Pop-Up Magazine, Chas was co-founder of Federated Media, publisher and chief revenue officer at Digg, and an executive at CNET Networks. Along the way he helped launch a cable TV network, raised money for Youth Speaks, worked at tech startups and print magazines, and passed a typing test to land his first media-industry job, in book publishing.

Claudia Milne is senior vice president, Standards and Practices for CBS News and Stations, where she oversees all CBS News editorial standards and ensures they are being maintained across all CBS News, stations and digital platforms.

Elene Mikaberidze was born in Georgia in 1988 and spent most of her life in Brussels, Belgium. She studied politics and gained an MA degree in Eastern Europe & Caucasus Studies with a thesis on “The Representation of War and the Narratives of Identity in Modern Georgian Cinema.” She completed film critic courses and worked in cinematography.

In 2016, Elene moved back to Georgia and started to direct her own films. She has worked as a programmer at the Tbilisi International Film Festival and is an alumnus of Filmmakers for Peace by GoEAST IFF, From Script 2 Film, EurasiaDOC, Talent Nest at Vilnius Meeting Point, IDFA Academy and EAVE. Her last projects were supported by the French CNC, the Belgium Film Fund, the Doha Film Institute and the Hubert Bals Fund.

Elene’s first feature documentary “Blueberry Dreams” premiered in 2024 in the Next Wave competition at CPH DOX.

Eliza Anyangwe is the editor-in-chief of Fuller, the newsroom for global, groundbreaking reporting on women and gender-diverse people. Fuller focuses on deep-dive storytelling that reveals the systems that create and sustain gender inequality and covers —  through its multimedia features, newsletters, social-first video journalism, collaborative investigations and live events — the work to advance equity and dignity.

Eliza is also co-founder of The Gender Beat, a collaborative project to promote nuanced, impactful gender journalism and build a supportive community for those who produce it, particularly in the Majority World.

Before joining Fuller, Eliza led CNN gender inequality reporting team As Equals, with whom she won an EMMY in 2023. She was managing editor of The Correspondent, a platform for constructive, member-funded, ad-free journalism, and has also worked at The Bureau for Investigative Journalism and The Guardian.

Passionate about the transformative power of stories, Eliza has worked across formats, producing the short film, “Not Yet Satisfied” and contributing to Africa’s Media Image in the 21st Century, published by Routledge.

Emily Bell is Founding Director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, Leonard Tow professor of Journalism, and a leading thinker, commentator and strategist on digital journalism. The majority of Emily’s career was spent at Guardian News and Media in London working as an award winning writer and editor both in print and online. As editor-in-chief across Guardian websites and director of digital content for Guardian News and Media, Emily led the web team in pioneering live blogging, multimedia formats, data and social media ahead, making the Guardian a recognized pioneer in the field. She is co-author of Post Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present (2012) with C.W. Anderson and Clay Shirky. Emily is a trustee on the board of the Scott Trust, the owners of The Guardian, a member of Columbia Journalism Review’s board of overseers, an adviser to Tamedia Group in Switzerland, chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Advisory Council on social media, and a member of Poynter’s National Advisory Board. She lives in New York City with her husband and children.

Geoff Dyer is a writer whose many books include the novel “Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi,” “Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It,” ”The Last Days of Roger Federer” and, most recently, “Homework: A Memoir.”

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. His books have won numerous prizes and have been translated into 26 languages.

Ghaith Abdulahad is an award-winning Iraqi author and journalist, born and raised in Baghdad. He studied architecture at the University of Baghdad before turning to journalism in the aftermath of the 2003 U.S. invasion.

Since then, Ghaith has reported extensively for The Guardian, covering major conflicts across the Middle East and beyond, including Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Iraq.

His reporting has won multiple awards, including the Orwell Prize in journalism, the British Press Award and two Emmys. In 2023, Ghaith published his critically acclaimed debut book, “A Stranger in Your Own City,” an account of the catastrophic aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and of the years of civil war that followed.

Giulia Trincardi is an author and lecturer based in Milan. She  teaches Digital Cultures and Worldbuilding for Interactive Media at NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, with a focus on playfulness as a practice for questioning dominant narratives. She studied Media Design, Game Analysis, and Screenwriting, and has worked as Science and Tech Editor at VICE Italy, featured on festivals and pop culture talk shows and created YouTube and podcast content.

Giulia is currently translating her passion for tabletop RPGs into the design of tailored serious play experiences for companies and institutions.

Irma Dimitradze is a Communications Manager and journalist at Gazeti Batumelebi LLC, an independent Georgian media organization that operates online outlets batumelebi.ge and netgazeti.ge. She recently investigated and exposed the abuse of personal data — including special category data — affecting tens of thousands of voters by Georgia's ruling party ahead of the October 2024 elections. Dimitradze has a particular interest in China-Georgia relations and is actively engaged in independent media advocacy programs. She is also a member of the International Press Institute (IPI), a Vienna-based global network of editors, media executives, and leading journalists.

Isobel Cockerell is a senior reporter with Coda Story. She joined Coda in 2018 after graduating from Columbia Journalism School. She writes about historical reckonings, dystopia, surveillance, conspiracies and climate. She was nominated for the 2023 Orwell prize and was the winner of the 2020 European Press Prize.

Jake Friedman is a manager and producer who has contributed to numerous #1 albums, sold-out tours, and critically acclaimed works in music, theater, and film. He launched his own record label at the age of 19 and led We Are Free Management for a decade. In 2019, he co-founded Crush Works, where he manages artists across multiple disciplines while producing notable works like 'Derek DelGaudio's In & Of Itself' for Disney+ and 'Neal Brennan: Blocks' on Netflix.

Joe Sabia is a filmmaker and digital artist with an intuitive talent for conceiving viral concepts and formats. He is the creator and interviewing voice of Vogue’s iconic “73 Questions” series, featuring 90 of the world's biggest A-list celebrities like Taylor Swift, Adele, Roger Federer, Bad Bunny, and Jennifer Lawrence. He is also the interviewer of the annual “Billie Eilish, One Year Later” series for Vanity Fair.
In 2024, Joe directed his first feature film, FEDERER: 12 FINAL DAYS, for Amazon Studios, documenting the retirement of Roger Federer from tennis, alongside director Asif Kapadia. He currently serves as a creative director for TEAM8 Studios, leading the development and execution of commercial content for Roger Federer and Ben Shelton.
Joe was the SVP of Creative Development at Condé Nast Entertainment, where he led the creation of digital franchises like Wired’s Autocomplete Interviews, Vanity Fair’s Lie Detector Interviews, Glamour’s You Sang My Song, and GQ’s Actually Me.
In 2011, Joe received a content innovation grant from YouTube to launch a music video channel called CDZA, which involved 150 conservatory-trained musicians, gained 300,000 subscribers in 18 months, and performed alongside Arcade Fire and Lady Gaga during YouTube’s first-ever YouTube Music Awards, collaborating with Spike Jonze.
Joe is an advisor to MasterClass, The Moth, Outlier.org, and Tonebase Piano. He currently runs his own creative strategy agency and production company called Somehow Studios, working with clients like Audible, YouTube, Spotify, American Express, Carnegie Hall, and UNICEF.
Joe is a lifelong classical piano lover and amateur pianist (and a member of the Franz Liszt Society, with his car’s license plate reading “B LISZT”). He considers himself an unofficial cultural ambassador to the country of Georgia, has dual citizenship with the US and Italy, gave a TED Talk, won an international pun championship, and once drove from England to Mongolia in a small Fiat for charity. He splits his time between NYC and Dutchess County, NY. He'll become a dad this summer.

Jo Franco is a multilingual storyteller exploring how language and culture expand the way we see the world, and ourselves within it.
A travel presenter for Netflix’s The World’s Most Amazing Vacation Rentals and National Geographic’s Big Little Italy, Jo has built a global audience of over 1.3 million followers across platforms through culture-driven storytelling.

Speaking seven languages, Jo brings her perspective as a cultural “Inbetweener” to films and essays that examine identity, belonging, and the philosophies hidden inside language and culture. She holds a master’s degree in filmmaking with distinction and is currently producing an independent travel series focused on untranslatable expressions around the world called “Translated.”

Jo is the author of the best-selling language journal Fluentish and the founder of JoClub, a global journaling community rooted in introspection and multilingual connection.

Jon Lee Anderson, a staff writer, began contributing to The New Yorker in 1998. Since then, he has covered numerous conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, including in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Angola, Somalia, Sudan, Mali, and Liberia. He has also reported frequently from Latin America, writing about Cuba’s migrant exodus, Rio de Janeiro’s gangs, the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, an isolated tribe in Peru’s Amazon, and a Caracas shantytown, among other subjects.

He has written profiles of Augusto Pinochet, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro, Javier Milei, and Gabriel García Márquez. His books include “Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life,” “Guerrillas: Journeys in the Insurgent World,” “The Fall of Baghdad,” and “To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban.”

Jon Lee is a co-author, with Scott Anderson, of two books, “War Zones: Voices from the World’s Killing Grounds” and “Inside the League.” He received a 2026 Overseas Press Club Award for his piece on the abuses of the Assad regime in Syria, and a 2025 George Polk Award for his reporting on the Congo’s 30-year war. In 2013, he was awarded a Maria Moors Cabot Prize for outstanding reporting on Latin America and the Caribbean.

Jon Williams is the Executive Director of Rory Peck Trust, a UK based non-profit that works to empower freelance journalists around the world. He is a three-time Emmy award winning editor and storyteller.

As Managing Director of RTÉ News, Jon  led the digital transformation of the Irish public service
broadcaster, leading a team of 350 journalists producing daily news and long form current affairs
content for radio, TV, and digital platforms. He took RTÉ News to market leadership online and on air, championing fact-based journalism and building trust in journalism, doubling RTÉ’s global reporting footprint and establishing it as Ireland’s most trusted news source.
Jon spent seven years as the BBC’s foreign editor, directing coverage of the Arab Spring and the war in Afghanistan. He led more than 200 journalists in more than 30 different countries, winning the International Emmy for News Coverage for the Israel Hezbollah war in Lebanon and an Emmy Award for reporting from Syria before moving to New York to become Managing Editor of ABC News. There, he oversaw global newsgathering for the Walt Disney Company, winning a third Emmy for its coverage of the Syrian refugee crisis.

Jon has served as the BBC’s UK News Editor and relaunched Britain’s most watched news
programme, BBC ONE’s Six o’clock News. He is a board member of the New York based media freedom NGO, the Committee to Protect Journalists where he chairs the board’s Journalists Assistance Committee, and of the UN Refugee Agency’s UK fundraising foundation.

Julia Watson started in publishing before moving first to the UK’s Sunday Times, then the Observer. She spent four years in Moscow as the Evening Standard’s first Russia Foreign Correspondent before transferring to Washington DC. There she wrote a weekly column for a UK national and features for other UK and U.S. outlets.

Back in London, Julia worked on the food and style pages of the Mail On Sunday’s YOU Magazine before returning to Washington DC where she was the Food Writer for United Press International and wrote on style and food for the Washington Post, Gourmet, a newspaper group, and others and ran her own food website, eatWashington.com

She is the author of novels “Russian Salad” and “American Pie” and compiler of children’s poetry collections for Puffin, Armada Lions, Collins and Faber, and contributor to books on house style and food. The German edition of Bruno’s Cookbook, also published by Knopf and Quercus and co-authored with novelist Martin Walker, won Gourmand International’s award for World’s Best French Cookbook. Julia writes Tabled, a weekly Substack on food.

Julie Posetti is the Global Director of Research at the International Center for Journalists. She previously was a Senior Research Fellow at the RISJ and led the Journalism Innovation Project at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. She researches at the intersection of journalism, digital media, and freedom of expression. Posetti is the author of Protecting Journalism Sources in the Digital Age (UNESCO 2017) and the co-editor of Journalism, ‘Fake News’ and Disinformation (UNESCO 2018). She was awarded her PhD in December 2018, and her academic research has been published internationally in peer reviewed journals and scholarly books. Dr Posetti brings over two decades of high-level international journalism practice to her research, including time as a news editor, documentary reporter and national political correspondent with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). She has been awarded the Australian Human Rights Awards for Radio, and the Australian National Press Club’s ‘German Award for Journalism’. More recently, her work has been published by The Atlantic, Harvard University’s Nieman Lab, the BBC, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian.

Karen Hao is the NYT bestselling author of “Empire of AI” and an award-winning reporter covering the impacts of artificial intelligence on society. She co-hosts the BBC podcast “The Interface” and contributes to publications including More Perfect Union and The Atlantic. She also co-created the Pulitzer Center's AI Spotlight Series, a program that has trained thousands of journalists around the world on how to cover AI.

Karen was formerly a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, covering American and Chinese tech companies, and a senior editor for AI at MIT Technology Review. She has received numerous accolades for her coverage, including an American Humanist Media Award, an American National Magazine Award for Journalists Under 30, and a TIME100 AI honor. She received her Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from MIT.

Kumi Naidoo is a South African human rights and environmental justice activist who is currently the president of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. He is the former secretary-general of Amnesty International (2018–2020) and also the first person from the Global South to lead Greenpeace International (2009–2015). He is an advisor for the Community Arts Network.
Kumi serves as a global ambassador for Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity. His family has started the Riky Rick Foundation for the Promotion of Artivism to build on the positive legacies left by popular South African rapper Rikhado “Riky Rick” Makhado through his music and life’s work. Through this foundation, Kumi co-founded the Global Energising Artivism Initiative. He is also the author of the award-winning “Letters to My Mother: The Makings of a Troublemaker” and the host of the podcast “Power, People and Planet.”

Laurence Lee spent 30 years working in national and international television news before leaving his career to establish a program aimed at helping disadvantaged young people with oracy and speaking skills. He currently works with the Financial Times’s Early Careers Unit, with recovering drug and alcohol addicts in south east England and is an ambassador for the charity Action for Stammering Children.

Leopoldo López is a freedom  activist from Venezuela. He was a political prisoner from 2014 to 2020 after being sentenced to 14 years in prison for leading non-violent street protests and civil resistance in 2014. After spending seven years in confinement, he managed to escape the autocratic regime of Nicolas Maduro in October 2020 and was able to travel to Spain where he lives with his family.

From 2000 to 2008 Leopoldo  was mayor of the Municipality of Chacao in Caracas and was later illegally disqualified to run for office. He won his case at the Inter American Commission on Human Rights.. In 2009, he founded the political party and freedom movement called Voluntad Popular (Popular Will) and became its national coordinator.

Leopoldo is the co-founder of the World Liberty Congress, an organization that seeks to serve as the counterweight against the global autocratic alliance by connecting non-violent, pro-democracy activists and leaders from across the globe. He is also a visiting fellow at the Wilson Center and The Institute, and has been teaching at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies in Stanford University.

Leopoldo is married to Lilian Tintori and has three children.

Lindsey Hilsum is Channel 4 News' International Editor and the author of “I Brought The War with Me; Stories and Poems from the Front Line.” Recently she has reported on the revolution in Syria, and the wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Ukraine. She has covered the major wars and refugee movements of the past three decades, including Afghanistan, the Sahel, Iraq, Kosovo and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Between  2006-2008 Lindsey was based in China, and in 1994 was the only English-speaking foreign correspondent in Rwanda as the genocide started. She has won many awards, including the Royal Television Society Journalist of the Year, the Charles Wheeler Award and the Royal Geographical Society Patron’s Medal. She  contributes regularly to newspapers and literary magazines. Her book, “In Extremis; the Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin,” won the 2019 James Tait Black Prize for biography. Her first book was “Sandstorm; Libya in the Time of Revolution.”

Mahsa Alimardani is the Associate Director of Technology Threats and Opportunities at WITNESS, the global human rights organization, where she leads a portfolio on AI and visual truth, including deepfake detection, synthetic media and the human rights implications of AI-generated content.  At WITNESS, Mahsa founded and incubated the Direct2Cell coalition, which brings together human rights organizations to confront the human rights implications of satellite-to-phone connectivity in closed information environments.

Iranian-Canadian and based in London, Mahsa has spent 15 years working at the intersection of technology and human rights, particularly within authoritarian contexts such as Iran, where she has documented how the Islamic Republic builds and weaponises its internet infrastructure against its own people. Her latest essays for The Atlantic delve into AI, protest and conflict in Iran. Her writing and work have been featured in Wired, the BBC, France 24, CNN and British Vogue. She is also a researcher with the University of Oxford's Oxford Internet Institute and served as an Open Tech Fund Senior Information Control Fellow.

Mélissa Cornet is a women’s rights writer and researcher. She has been working in Afghanistan since 2018, where she researches women’s economic empowerment, the impact of crises on them and violence against women, among other topics.

Mélissa stayed in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover in 2021, continuing to travel across the country, offering a unique perspective on the degrading situation of the rights of Afghan women and girls. Her reporting was published in The Guardian, the London Review of Books, Libération, and Panorama. Along with photographer Kiana Hayeri,  Mélissa is the co-laureate of the 14th Carmignac Photojournalism Award in 2024 for their reportage “No Woman’s Land,” documenting the lives of Afghan women and girls under the Taliban.

Michael Barenboim is one of the leading violinists of his generation, performing as a soloist with the most renowned conductors and orchestras. He is also a professor at the Barenboim-Said Akademie, and concertmaster of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.

Since early 2024, Michael has come into the spotlight for speaking out about Gaza. In May 2024, he held a federal press conference together with experts about the pro-Palestinian student protests. In August of the same year, he published a critique in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of the draft Bundestag resolution on antisemitism in the cultural sector.

At another federal press conference in Berlin, Michael stated: “The endless massacres that have taken place in the Gaza Strip, but also in the West Bank and Lebanon — and which have been broadcast almost live worldwide over the past 14 months — oblige Germany finally to end its support for Israel, whether military, diplomatic, or legal.”

Mchael delivered a speech at the Berlin “All Eyes on Gaza” rally with 100,000 participants in September 2025 and continued to contribute to the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Michael is also part of Make Freedom Ring, a classical musicians’ collective that regularly organizes charity concerts for Palestine across Europe. He is a member of the association of Palestinian and Jewish Academics (PJA) and co-curates a talk series called “Kilmé Talks,” platforming Palestinian artists and academics. He is the creator of Ensemble Nasmé, a classical ensemble of Palestinian musicians touring throughout Europe.

Michelle Darby has spent nearly 40 years bringing stories to life — as an actor, director, singer, and celebrated storytelling teacher and coach. For the past 13 years, she has taught the art of true, personal narrative across the globe, including seven years at Stanford University, online for public audiences, and in person around the world. Her students have ranged from professionals in international organizations to first-time storytellers finding their voice.

Over those 13 years, Michelle developed her own unique method of teaching personal storytelling — a process rooted in structure, presence, vulnerability, and emotional truth. She continues to teach this approach in workshops, classes, and coaching sessions around the world.

Michelle serves as story curator and coach for Stories From the Stage, produced by WGBH and The World in Boston, MA, and aired on most PBS stations throughout the U.S.

Nadia is a journalist, critic and pianist. She is managing editor at Coda Story and programme director at ZEG Fest. Her articles, essays and criticism appear in the Financial Times, The New Yorker, and National Geographic among many others. She was editor-in-chief of The Calvert Journal, an award-winning magazine covering contemporary art, culture and society in Russia, Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus. Prior to that, she was Moscow correspondent for The Independent. Her first book, a memoir on music, will be out from WW Norton (US) and Faber & Faber (UK) in 2026.

Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah is the author of “Seeking Sexual Freedom: African Rites, Rituals, and Sankofa in the Bedroom.” Her debut, “The Sex Lives of African Women,” was an instant classic, lauded by Publishers Weekly as “an astonishing report on the quest for sexual liberation” and named a Best Book of the Year by The Economist.

Nana Darkoa is also an award winning podcaster, a festival curator, and the co-founder of the Institute of Journalism and Social Change.
Her transformative work has earned her international recognition, including a spot on the BBC's 100 inspirational and influential women list and New Africa magazine's list of 100 inspirational Africans.

Natalia Antelava is a co-founder of ZEG Fest and co-founder and editor-in-chief of Coda Story, an award-winning newsroom that covers the roots of global crises. Originally from Tbilisi, Natalia has been a BBC correspondent in the Caucasus, Central Asia, Middle East, Washington DC and India. She has covered the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, the wars in Iraq and in Eastern Ukraine and reported undercover from Burma, Yemen and Uzbekistan. Her investigations into human rights abuses in Central Asia, Iraq and the United States have won her a number of awards. In addition to a career in broadcast journalism, she has written for the Guardian, Forbes magazine and the New Yorker. She is currently John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University.

Nick Laparra is a storyteller, a consultant, and an activist. He is the founder of a multifaceted social impact company called Let’s Give A Damn and is the host of the Let’s Give A Damn podcast. On the podcast, Nick has conversations with activists, artists, authors, entrepreneurs, and all kinds of leaders—including Matthew McConaughey, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Rainn Wilson, Colman Domingo, ALOK, Katherine Hayhoe, Chelsea Clinton, and hundreds of other damn good humans.

Nick grew up in Guatemala, has spent years engaged in social impact work in dozens of countries, and now lives in New York City with his partner and children.

Phil Chetwynd is the Global News Director of Agence France-Presse (AFP). He leads a newsroom of 1,700 journalists based in over 150 countries. Phil has been responsible for AFP's editorial strategy prioritizing on-the-ground human storytelling in multimedia formats, the development of a world-class video service and an award-winning pivot on climate coverage. He has also made AFP a leading voice in the battle against disinformation.
During a long career at AFP, Phil occupied the posts of Global Editor-in-Chief and Chief Asia Editor. He was also a foreign correspondent working in Asia and the Middle East. He began his career in British newspapers. He sits on the World Editors Forum and the board of Reporters Without Borders.

A Scotsman turned global storyteller, Quentin Sommerville has built a career reporting on the world's most dangerous hotspots.
His early days as a Shanghai and Beijing correspondent honed his skills for navigating across cultures, while his three-year stint as the BBC’s Afghanistan correspondent brought him face-to-face with the human cost of conflict.
Through his insightful reporting, he gives a voice to those living in the midst of turmoil, offering viewers a glimpse into the dark reality of war.
He’s won multiple awards for his war reporting from Iraq, Syria, Libya and Ukraine. Most recently he’s reported from the war in Ukraine, the uprising in Myanmar, and the drugs trade along the US Mexico border. Through his insightful reporting, he gives a voice to those living in the midst of turmoil, offering viewers a glimpse into the dark reality of war.
Quentin Sommerville been based in Beirut for the last decade. He studied at Edinburgh University and grew up in Stirling and Glasgow.

Rachel Corp is Chief Executive Officer of ITN, overseeing one of the largest independent production companies in the UK. ITN currently creates more than 50 hours of television each week and amasses over 7 billion views of digital content annually.

ITN produces Emmy- and BAFTA-winning news programmes and content for the UK’s commercial public service broadcasters—ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5—alongside award-winning factual programming for global streamers, international broadcasters, major brands, and digital platforms.

Prior to becoming CEO, Rachel was Editor of ITV News, where she led the team behind celebrated exclusive and original reporting both in the UK and internationally.

Rachel Shabi is an award-winning journalist, who has reported extensively on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Now based in the UK, she covers current affairs, with her work appearing across international publications, including The Guardian, The New York Times, the London Times, The Nation and the New York Review of Books.

Her first book, “Not the Enemy: Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands” received the US National Jewish Book Award. Her latest book, “Off White: The Truth About Antisemitism”, has received widespread acclaim. Journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown praises Rachel's “unique sensibility, embodying multiple identities and universal, non-negotiable human rights.”

Razia Iqbal is the John L Weinberg/Goldman Sachs Visiting Professor at Princeton University.Before that she spent 34 years as a BBC journalist.

Rena Effendi is a filmmaker, writer, award-winning documentary photographer and author of two monographs “Pipe Dreams: A Chronicle of Lives along the Pipeline” and “Liquid Land.”

Her photography has been described as having a deep sense of empathy with a quiet celebration of the strength of the human spirit. She is the laureate of the Prince Claus Fund award and has been shortlisted for the Prix Pictet award in Photography and Sustainability.

Rena spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos twice and is a member of its Cultural Leadership network. Her work has been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Saatchi Gallery, İstanbul Modern, Venice Biennial and NYC MOMA. Rena Effendi is a National Geographic Explorer and a frequent contributor to the National Geographic Magazine.

Arcy (Rosmery De la Cruz Suazo) is a Geneva-based queer Afrolatina educator, standup comic, and author. Born in the Dominican Republic, she is the creator of LUCY33 — the world's first femicide aftermath educational framework, built from 33 years of lived experience and 14 years of field practice training over 2,500 practitioners across three continents.

She performs at the intersection of human rights and comedy — because grief and laughter have always lived in the same chest, and silence has never been a survival strategy.

She is currently writing her first book, "Built to Failed" — a memoir of femicide aftermath, 33 years in the making.

Sahar Dowlatshahi is a Paris-based Iranian translator of Farsi/Persian to and from English and Spanish, and from French and Italian. She has translated a number of fiction and non-fiction books and regularly works with major media organizations. She is about to launch a platform for translated Iranian literature, “Peacock Tales.”

Dr. Seema Jilani is an Assistant Professor of Pediatric Hospitalist Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital, where she trained. Her humanitarian aid work has taken her to Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Bosnia, Ukraine, Gaza and the West Bank over the past 20 years. She has treated migrants on board refugee rescue ships in the Mediterranean Sea, critically ill children on board medical evacuation flights, and responded on the scene after the 2020 explosion in the Port of Beirut, Lebanon. She was selected by the U.S. State Department as a Senior Fulbright Scholar to Istanbul, where she designed a curriculum for medical students on how to engage in media advocacy. Dr. Jilani has briefed the United Nations Security Council, the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Senior Officials at The White House and National Security Council. She is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and her work has been featured in The New York Times, NPR, PBS NewsHour, The New Yorker, GQ Heroes, and The Guardian.

Şerife Wong is a Turkish-Kānaka Maoli artist and the founder of Icarus Salon, a conceptual art organization at the intersection of politics and technology. Her practice focuses on the narratives surrounding AI and power, and has been recognized with fellowships and awards from Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Berggruen Institute, Mozilla Foundation, Creative Capital, and Salzburg Global.

Şerife is the chairman of OCEAN, working on algorithmic accountability in the public interest. She serves as an affiliate research scientist at UC Berkeley’s Kidd Lab, an affiliate of O'Neil Risk Consulting and Algorithmic Auditing, and on the boards of Gray Area and Tech Inquiry. She is a frequent collaborator with Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and was previously an editor at Artnet Magazine. She is a member of the San Francisco art and DJ collective Brass Tax.

Shelley Thakral is the spokesperson for the World Food Programme (WFP) in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She has also worked with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Facebook/Meta, WHO, and UNICEF. Previously, she served as the WFP spokesperson in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, as well as in Afghanistan, Southern Africa, and Yemen.
Shelley spent 16 years as a BBC journalist, reporting from regions including North America, the Middle East, and South Asia. Born in Britain,  she now calls North Goa home.

Tara McDonald is a UK-based psychotherapist, play therapist and clinical supervisor with a passion for supporting children, adolescents and the systems around them. She spent 10 years in Thailand, working with children, families and communities within a child and adolescent mental health setting. She also founded a network delivering infant mental health training to social workers and NGOs.

Tara’s work is rooted in the understanding that our stories live not only in the mind, but in the body and are carried through our nervous system, relationships and history. She creates space for these stories to be safely held, explored and gently integrated.

Alongside her private practice, Tara trains and supervises therapists, with a focus on family systems and relational trauma. She is the co-author of “A Polyvagal Informed Approach to Therapeutic Work with Children and Young People.’

Thomas Dworzak is a German photographer and member of the photo agency Magnum Photos. In the early 1990s, he started photographing mainly in the Caucasus and has since been documenting conflicts in the Balkans, the Middle East and Africa.

Thomas has regularly contributed to The New Yorker, Time Magazine, National Geographic and many others and has published several books.

Viola Stefanello is a Milan-based journalist who makes sense of the internet for people who live on it — and people who don't.
Writing for Italy's Il Post, she explores everything from fandom culture to online radicalization.

Over the past decade, Viola covered memes, politics, and digital subcultures for Wired, Rolling Stone, Internazionale, and the Daily Dot, developing a reputation for finding the human stories behind the screenshots. She also co-organizes events about the internet and pop culture, because sometimes you need to log off to laugh about being online.

Dr. Volodymyr Yermolenko is a Ukrainian philosopher, journalist and writer. President of PEN Ukraine. He is a Doctor of political studies, has a PhD in philosophy and serves as chief editor of UkraineWorld.org, a multimedia project in English about Ukraine run by Internews Ukraine.

Volodymir is a  professor at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and has written fiction and non-fiction. He won the Myroslav Popovych and Petro Mohyla Prizes in 2021 and the Yurii Sheveliov Prize in 2018. He’s also a three-time winner of the Book of the Year prize in Ukraine.

Volodymyr serves as head of the board of the International Renaissance Foundation and is a public lecturer. He’s the author of podcasts “Explaining Ukraine” and “Thinking in Dark Times” and co-author  of “Kultpodcast.”

Author of numerous articles in international and Ukrainian media, Volodymyr has been featured in The Economist, Le Monde, Financial Times, New York Times,  Newsweek, BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, France 24 and other outlets. His texts and interviews have been published in Ukrainian, English, French, German, Spanish, Polish, Italian, Russian, Dutch, Norwegian, Czech, Greek, Chinese and other languages.

Yaroslav Trofimov is the author of three books of narrative non-fiction and one novel. He has worked around the world as a foreign correspondent of The Wall Street Journal since 1999, and has served as the newspaper’s chief foreign-affairs correspondent since 2018. Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting in 2023 for his work on Ukraine, and in 2022, for his work on Afghanistan. His honors include an Overseas Press Club award for coverage of India as well as the Washington Institute gold medal for the best book on the Middle East. Yaroslav holds an MA from New York University. He is represented by Elias Altman at Massie & McQuilkin literary agency in New York.

Zelda Perkins was the first woman to break a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) — signed decades earlier — with Harvey Weinstein in 2017. She brought the systematic abuse of NDAs to the attention of the British Government and international press, giving evidence at two parliamentary inquiries, which uncovered an epidemic of misuse, and pushed the Solicitors Regulatory Authority to take disciplinary action against the lawyer who created the NDAs for Weinstein. Her actions have inspired others to come forward by her example.

Zelda has been campaigning for legislative and regulatory reform in the UK since 2017 and launched the campaign Can’t Buy My Silence UK in 2021. The campaign has worked with governments in the UK, Ireland and across Canada
and Australia, achieving successful legislative reforms in three countries. The most significant reforms being in the UK with amendments to the Employment Rights Act 2025, Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, Victims and Prisoners Act and the Victims and Courts Bill, which will together make NDAs void if used to silence victims or witnesses of harassment, discrimination, or crime. Her work has also helped implement significant re- evaluation by the legal sector around ethical practice and confidentiality.

Zelda has won multiple awards including Person of the Year by Time Magazine in 2018, Outstanding Contribution to Gender Equality by UN Women UK in 2023 and was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) for services to social justice in 2025. Her character was portrayed by Samantha Morton in the Universal Pictures feature “She Said”, documenting her part in the downfall of Weinstein.