ZEG London: Stories That Connect Us

Professor Anna Whitelock is a historian, author and broadcaster. She is Professor of the History of Monarchy at City, University of London. Anna is an international media commentator on monarchy, public history and heritage, and the Tudors and Stuarts. She is the Principal Investigator on a major AHRC project: The Visible Crown: Queen Elizabeth II in the Caribbean: 1952-present.

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.

Ava Lee is the Executive Director of People vs Big Tech, a movement of civil society organisations, activists and experts calling for technology that serves people and not profits. Before that she worked at investigative campaigning organisation Global Witness, where she built and led a team of investigators, researchers, advocates and communications specialists working to combat some of the biggest harms caused by Big Tech companies.

This has included exposing how Meta’s job advertising algorithm discriminates along gender lines, breaching equalities legislation, and a series of investigations that have demonstrated how companies including Meta, TikTok, X and YouTube are unprepared to deal with incitement to genocide and violence (in Myanmar and Ethiopia), and are equally unprepared to deal with serious electoral misinformation ahead of significant elections (including in the US, Brazil, Kenya, UK, South Africa, Ireland and India).

Carissa Véliz is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI, and a Fellow at Hertford College at the University of Oxford. She is the recipient of the 2021 Herbert A. Simon Award for Outstanding Research in Computing and Philosophy. She is the author of the highly-acclaimed Privacy Is Power (an Economist book of the year, 2020) and the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics. She is a member of UNESCO’s Women 4 Ethical AI. She advises companies and policymakers around the world on privacy and the ethics of AI. She is a board member of the Proton Foundation, along with Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Proton’s CEO Andy Yen.

Christopher Wylie is a social researcher and data scientist. He has served as a senior adviser in both the British and Canadian governments, and has extensive experience using technology to improve communication and citizen engagement. With an avid interest in cultural applications of technology, his postgraduate research focused on fashion trend forecasting. Christopher is the former Director of Research for Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group, which was a UK-based military contractor specializing in information warfare. He witnessed firsthand how culture, information and algorithms were being weaponized by militaries, governments and companies to undermine elections around the world. In 2018, Wylie worked with The Guardian and New York Times as a whistleblower to expose how social media data was being exploited and turned against ordinary citizens. His testimonies at the United States Congress and British Parliament served as a wake-up call for many and have quickly led to new legislative proposals in both countries.

Dr. Adio-Adet Dinika is a researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), where he co-leads the Data Workers’ Inquiry, a global project documenting the hidden labour that powers artificial intelligence. His work focuses on data workers across Africa and the Global South, from content moderators in Nairobi to annotators in Madagascar, uncovering the human costs of AI’s rapid expansionA political scientist by training, Adio combines scholarship and activism to confront the colonial logics embedded in AI, advancing an ethics of accountability and worker-led, decolonial futures. He has conducted fieldwork in Zimbabwe, Kenya, Rwanda, and South Africa, and his essays and op-eds have appeared in outlets including Noema Magazine and Africa in Fact. He is also an advisory member of ZeMKI at the University of Bremen, in Germany.

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, Abdulahad has reported extensively for The Guardian, covering major conflicts across the Middle East and beyond—including Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Iraq. His work has earned numerous awards, including the Orwell Prize for Journalism, the British Press Award, and two Emmys, among others. In 2023, he published his critically acclaimed debut book, A Stranger in Your Own City—an unflinching account of the catastrophic aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the years of civil war that followed.

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.

Jane Martinson is the Marjorie Deane Professor of Financial Journalism at City St Georges as well as a journalist, author and director of the Scott Trust, the ultimate owners of the Guardian Media Group. A former Head of Media and Women's Editor for the Guardian, she still writes a regular column and specialises in the media, financial journalism and equality issues. Her first book You May Never See Us Again, about the Barclay brothers, was published in 2023.

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.

Khalid Abdalla is a British-Egyptian actor, writer, producer, and filmmaker. He is best known for playing Dodi Fayed in The Crown, and for his roles in Marc Forster’s The Kite Runner, Paul Greengrass’s United 93 and Green Zone, and The Day of the Jackal.
Khalid produced and starred in the critically acclaimed Egyptian feature In the Last Days of the City, directed by Tamer El Said, and appeared in Tala Hadid’s The Narrow Frame of Midnight. He is also featured in Jehane Noujaim’s Oscar-nominated documentary The Square, which chronicles the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
Most recently, he performed onstage in Théâtre de Complicité’s Mnemonic at the National Theatre, and his debut play as a writer, Nowhere, sold out to critical acclaim in its inaugural run.
Khalid is a founding member of three influential cultural initiatives in Cairo—Cimatheque, Zero Production, and Mosireen—and has collaborated on projects with contemporary artists including Aura Satz, Brad Butler and Noor Afshan Mirza, Christiaan Bastiaans, Diego Tonus, and Elisa Caldana.
He is an Honorary Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge, and is widely recognized for his advocacy and campaigning work across the Arab region and internationally.

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. He 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, he co-founded the Global Energising Artivism Initiative. Kumi is also the author of award-winning Letters To My Mother: The Makings of a Troublemaker and the host of the podcast Power, People and Planet.

Lars Sellien is a communications professional working at the intersection of information technology, social media and human rights. Currently, he is working with a team of civil society investigators and campaigners who monitor the impact of Meta, ByteDance, Alphabet, X, OpenAI and other Big Tech players on the global information ecosystem.

This included investigating right-wing bias in social media recommendation algorithms ahead of crucial European elections (Germany, Romania, Poland), exposing bot-like accounts on X spreading climate disinformation ahead of COP29 and quantifying how much money Google ads make from the known climate disinformation spreader ‘The Epoch Times’.

Before Global Witness, Lars worked with several civil society organisations campaigning on child online safety, better working conditions for gig workers in East and West Africa and the implementation of open government initiatives.

After leaving his job in the fashion industry in Paris, Luka returned to Georgia, deeply troubled by the country’s political situation. He joined the protests, and in the process, discovered that writing helped him process his frustration and make sense of what was happening. Realizing that telling these stories could raise awareness and drive change, he began writing for Coda Story.

Matthew Janney is a British-Georgian writer based in London and a former editor at TANK magazine. He writes about literature, culture and the Caucasus and his work has appeared in the Guardian, the Financial Times, the New Statesman, Coda Story, the Times Literary Supplement, and others. Before writing, Matthew played international rugby for Georgia.

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.

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.

Nino Nanitashvili is a technology evangelist with more than 12 years of management and consulting experience in the tech & startup industry. Currentl,y she supports Google for Startups Accelerator programs across Europe and Israel. Nino has worked with private, non-profit, and government institutions and has consulted with international organizations including the World Bank, United States Agency for International Development, Asian Development Bank, the United Nations Development Program, Grameen Creative Lab and Google. Furthermore, Nino serves as a mentor, youth educator, and advocate for women and girls in both the Georgian and global tech ecosystems. She is one of the creators of the Grace Hopper Award that celebrates and encourages diversity in the ICT industry. Nino's academic background lies in entrepreneurship, social sciences and public policy, including her MSc in Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Nino's work has been recognised by and showcased via Forbes 30 Under 30, TEdx, One Young World, Emerging Young Leaders Award, Women in Computing Social Impact Award and more.

Oliver Bullough is an award-winning journalist and author from Wales, and the author of Coda's oligarchy newsletter. He specialises in writing about financial crime and the former Soviet Union, and his most recent books have been Butler to the World and Moneyland.

Oliver believes in making the world a better place through music.

A concert pianist & composer committed to using music for positive impact, he garners acclaim worldwide for his extraordinary artistry and captivating performances. Recognised as "A True Master Of His Instrument” (Helen Spoelstra, BBC), ”Outrageously Talented" (Dubrovnik Times), “Oliver Poole le magnifique” (L’Orient-Le Jour), he has enchanted audiences globally, from leading stages to millions for live TV concerts, with his his uniquely phenomenal artistry, electrifying drive and sensational interactive improvisations.

From debuting as a soloist with the British National Youth Orchestra at age eight to acclaimed performances as a soloist with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the St. Petersburg Philharmonic (with whom he performed the centenary revival of Rubinstein's 3rd Piano Concerto) Grammy winners Czech National Symphony Orchestra and Georgian Philharmonic to name a few, concerts at prestigious venues including the Royal Albert Hall, Cadogan Hall, Barbican, Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire, St. Petersburg Great Philharmonic Hall, Tbilisi Opera House, Astana Concert Hall, at international festivals and  events including Al Bustan Festival, Henley Festival, Tsinandali Festival, Liszt Festival, London 2012 Olympic Games, Expo Dubai 2020 and EU Culture Week, for charities including the UN World Food Programme, World Aids Day, Teenage Cancer Trust, HemiHelp, Starlight Foundation, Desire Tree Foundation and Katie Piper Foundation, as well as for the British royal family, his musical journey reflects a dedication to excellence and innovation.

Beyond classical realms, Oliver frequently collaborates with some of the biggest musical figures in a wide range of genres, having composed for Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich's play, pop stars, world-renowned visual artists, international charities & initiatives, as well as enjoys giving masterclasses and pioneering world-firsts in music technology (with Phoenix Pianos), with his versatility extending to performances with artists such as Grammy winner A.R. Rahman, the Queen Piano Concerto (in collaboration with the band), for prestigious brands such as Loro Piana, Zara and LVMH, and notable events such as the Ambani wedding and exclusively for the global launch of Haig Club by David Beckham.

Oliver also serves as youth ambassador for the International Composers Festival, served as artist in residence at the Opus Theatre (where he co-founded the World Series concert series) and is an artist for EMMA for Peace, a non-profit organisation in collaboration with the UN which promotes music diplomacy.

With recent and current projects including a Sky Arts holiday special and a new album of Plachta's Piano Concerto with Grammy winners Czech National Symphony Orchestra released in June 2025, Oliver Poole continues to shape the musical landscape with his commitment to making a positive difference.

Peter Geoghegan is a writer, broadcaster and founder of the investigative website Democracy for Sale. His most recent book Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics was a Sunday Times best seller.

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.

Rena Effendi is a filmmaker, writer, an 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 prestigious Prix Pictet award in Photography and Sustainability.

She spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos twice and is a member of its Cultural Leadership network. Effendi’s 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.

Ryan Broderick is a freelance writer and podcaster specializing in web culture and technology. He writes Garbage Day, an award-winning newsletter that explores the daily joys and horrors of internet culture. His work has also appeared in Fast Company, The Verge, and Foreign Policy. And yes—he’s also met every famous internet cat.

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Susan Hawley is the Executive Director of anti-corruption campaigning organisation Spotlight on Corruption. She has been campaigning to highlight the role the UK plays in facilitating global corruption for over two decades, and to hold the UK government to account for its role in this.