Alex is one of most important Romanian photograhers. Born in 1979, he published his first image when he was a teenager. He has been photographing ever since, and has been Published in nearly all Romanian magazines, for which he shot covers, editorials, and portraits. He also made advertising campaigns with local, national and international coverage. His work has also been part of national and international exhibitions in in Bucharest, Paris, Toulouse, Nantes, Rejkyavik, and Cork.

You can see his work on his website.

Chris Jones is a writer at large for Esquire and a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. He has won two National Magazine Awards for his feature writing and two National Headliner Awards for his columns. He lives in Port Hope, Ontario, Canada, with his wife and two boys. He’s looking forward to his fourth (!) visit to Romania.

Watch Chris’ speech on reporting from 2013.
Watch Chris’ speech on writing from 2014.

Dragoș is a communication coach, journalist and civic activist. Before getting his MBA from Stanford University, he built two of Romania’s most prominent NGOs: Save the Danube Delta and MaiMultVerde. He has 12 years of experience as a columnist for national newspapers and magazines, and has produced and presented TV shows for public and private TV channels.

He trained more than 1,000 managers in public speaking, interpersonal communication and storytelling, and was awarded “Best Training of the Year” at the Business-Edu Awards Gala in 2010. During the past year, he served as Communication Adviser to the European Commissioner for Regional Policy.

Find out more about his current work.

Journalism wasn’t Jacqui Banaszynski’s first career choice.
She had aspirations to be an athlete, but grew up before Title IX gave girls equal access to the field.
She dreamed of being a commercial airline pilot or astronaut, but was handicapped by height and gender.
She probably should have been an architect, but in her rural school district in the 1960s, girls weren’t allowed into shop class where she would have learned drafting.
So she joined the high school newspaper staff, got the keys to the school car … and the rest is history.
It turned out OK.

Jacqui spent the next 30 years as a reporter and editor for newspapers in the Upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest. She has filed stories from all seven continents, including Antarctica. She has covered beauty pageants and popes, AIDS and the Olympics, dogsled expeditions and refugee camps — not to mention a constant run of planning commission and sewer board meetings. She came of age in the modern women’s movement, covered some of its crucible events and benefited from the battles fought on behalf of women everywhere.

She won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for an intimate series on a gay farm couple dying of AIDS, and was a finalist for the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for her on-the-ground coverage of the famine in sub-Saharan Africa. She won the Associated Press Sports Editors’ deadline reporting award for coverage of Greco-Roman wrestling at the 1988 Olympics and has edited several award-winning projects, including winners of ASNE Best Newspaper Writing, Ernie Pyle Human Interest Writing and national business, health, social issues and investigative prizes.

She now is a Knight Chair professor at the Missouri School of Journalism and an editing fellow at the Poynter Institute. She coaches reporters, writers and editors around the world. She remains loyal to the Green Bay Packers, hikes along Lake Superior and the high Cascades, believes in the healing powers of gardening and listening, and is always on the lookout for a good story.

Read her work on her website where she writes about journalism, craft and life.
Watch Jacqui’s speech on listening and interviewing from 2014.
Watch Jacqui’s speech on the power of stories to reach people from 2013.

Starlee is the host and producer of Mystery Show, one of the most popular podcasts in the world today. Her radio stories have also appeared on This American Life, and she’s also written for the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, and Capital New York. She’s also designed a cutting board for chopping onions on while heartbroken; written the saddest cartoon you’ll ever see about tattoos; dispensed anonymous advice to subway and bus riders; been one half of Starlee and Arthur Review, the first animated series (probably) done on Post-It Notes. This is her return trip to Romania – she spoke at the conference in 2012.

Listen to Mystery Show