Speaking this year

Alexander Nanau is a German-Romanian film producer and director. Born in Romania, he studied at the Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB). His documentary film The World According to Iob B. was awarded an International Emmy Award in 2010 and travelled to over 70 film festivals around the world.

Nanau received fellowships from the Academy of Arts Berlin and from the Sundance Institute. His first feature documentary, Peter Zadek Inszeniert Peer Gynt (2006) premiered at the Munich International Film Festival and was released in cinemas across Germany and Austria in 2006.

His latest feature documentary film, Toto and His Sisters, immerses in the family of three siblings struggling to escape the grip of poverty and drugs in a Bucharest ghetto. It won several awards and was acquired by over 20 international broadcasters, having its theatrical releases in France, Italy and Romania in 2015.

Follow the screenings of Toto and His Sisters

Carmen Bugan is the author of the internationally acclaimed memoir Burying The Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police, which was serialized for radio as BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, was a finalist in the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and was the foundation for BBC World News long form documentaries for television and radio. The book has been translated into Swedish and Polish; Romanian and Italian translations are underway. Her collections of poems are Crossing the Carpathians and The House of Straw​. She also wrote the monograph Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile. Her reviews been published​ in PEN, The Times Literary Supplement, Harvard Review, PN Review, Modern Poetry in Translation and other places. All of her poetry and selected prose on writing have been translated into Italian under the title Sulla Soglia della Dimenticanza/ On the Side of Forgetting. Her biographical memoir Life without a Country: Voices from the Cold War is forthcoming.

Carmen was a Creative Arts Fellow in Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford University, a Fellow at the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers, and a recipient of a large individual grant from The Arts Council of England. She appeared at book fairs and literary festivals such as: the London Book Fair, the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing,​ and​the Cork Literary Festival. She is a member of the Geneva Writers Group. She also presented the documentary The Man Who Went Looking for Freedom about her father’s dissidence in Romania for BBC World Service.

She was educated at the University of Michigan and Balliol College, Oxford, where she took a doctorate in English Literature. Carmen now lives in France with her husband and their two small children.

Read Carmen’s memoir Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Police.

Watch the BBC documentary The Man Who Went Looking for Freedom.

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.

Dan Perjovschi is an artist born in 1961; he lives and works in Bucharest and Sibiu, Romania. His solo exhibitions include Pression, Liberte, Expression at Magasin Grenoble in 2015, Unframed at Kiasma Helsinki 2013, News from the Island at Reykjavik Art Museum in 2012, Not over at MACRO Rome in 2011, Late News at Royal Ontario Museum Toronto in 2010, What Happen to US? at MoMA New York, I am not Exotic I am Exhausted at Kunsthalle Basel in 2007, and The Room Drawing at Tate Modern London.

He has also been part of group shows at the Sao Paolo Biennial 2014, Paris Triennial 2012, Dublin Contemporary in 2011, Lyon Biennial in 2009, the Sydney Biennial, Fifth Floor at Tate Liverpool in 2008, The Magelanic Cloud at Pompidou Paris, the 52nd Venice Biennial, the Moscow Biennial in 2007, and the 9th Istanbul Biennial in 2005.

Perjovschi received George Maciunas Prize in 2004 and ECF Princess Margriet Award in 2013 (with Lia Perjovschi).

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.

John Freeman is the author of The Tyranny of E-mail (Scribner) and How to Read a Novelist (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). He is also the editor of the literary biannual, Freeman’s. A former president of the National Book Critics Circle, his work has been translated into more than twenty languages.

From 2009 to 2013 he was editor of Granta magazine, and in 2014 he edited Tales of Two Cities: The Best of Times and Worst of Times in Today’s New York (Penguin), an anthology in benefit of Housing Works, a nonprofit arts space that supports homeless New Yorkers with HIV and AIDS. Freeman’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review and The Nation, and he is current at work on a book about American poetry. He teaches writing at the New School University and is an executive editor at Lit Hub. His bestselling book How to Read a Novelist is now available in Romanian translation.

Visit Lit Hub, where Freeman is an executive director.

Leslie Jamison is the author of The Empathy Exams, a New York Times bestselling essay collection, and a novel, The Gin Closet, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, Oxford American, A Public Space, Boston Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, and the New York Times, where she is a regular columnist for the Sunday Book Review. Her work has been translated into Chinese, Czech, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Dutch, and  – recently – Romanian.

More about Leslie at her website.

Michael Paterniti is the author of two New York Times bestselling books, The Telling Room (picked as one of the best books of the year by NPR, Entertainment Weekly, The Christian Science Monitor, and Kirkus) and Driving Mr. Albert (picked as a New York Times Notable Book). His essay collection, Love and Other Ways of Dying, was released earlier this year.

His work has appeared in publications including The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Harper’s, Esquire, and GQ, where he is a correspondent. He’s the winner of an NEA grant and National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, as well as fellowships from the MacDowell Colony.

He is the co-founder of a children’s writing center in Portland, Maine, where he lives with his wife, the writer Sara Corbett, and their three children.

Richard Koci Hernandez is a national Emmy award winning video and multimedia producer and worked as a photojournalist at the San Jose Mercury News for 15 years. His work has appeared in Time, Wired, The New York Times, a National Geographic book and international magazines.

In 2008, Richard was awarded a national Emmy award for the New Approaches to Documentary category for his executive producer work on the Mercury News video entitled, Uprooted. In 2003, Richard was the recipient of the James K. Batten Knight Ridder Excellence Award. His work for the Mercury News has earned him two Pulitzer Prize nominations.

Richard was named deputy director of photography and multimedia after spearheading the creation of MercuryNewsPhoto.com. He has taught multimedia workshops for Stanford University, USC Annenberg School for Communication, National Press Photographers Association, The Southern Short Course, National Association for Hispanic Journalists and National Association for Black Journalists, and TED Talks (Master Class).

He is a San Francisco State University journalism graduate, where he has been a guest instructor. In 2011 Richard was named an Assistant Professor for New Media at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley.

Richard work and portofolio.
Follow his famous Instagram feed.

Robert Krulwich is co-host of Radiolab, WNYC’s Peabody Award-winning program about “big ideas”, now one of public radio’s most popular shows. It is carried on more than 500 radio stations and its podcasts are downloaded over 5 million times each month. He is also the author of the Krulwich Wonders blog, featured for years on National Public Radio and now on National Geographic, where he illustrates hard-to-fathom concepts in science with anything at his disposal, using drawings, cartoons, videos, and more.

Krulwich’s curiosity and ability to explain complex subjects has made him, as the New York Times said, “a storied figure in public radio history.” For 22 years, Krulwich was a science, economics, general assignment and foreign correspondent at ABC and CBS News. Krulwich has been called “the most inventive network reporter in television” by TV Guide. He explored the structure of DNA using a banana on PBS; on radio he created an Italian opera, Ratto Interesso to explain how the Federal Reserve regulates interest rates; he also pioneered the use of new animation on ABC’s Nightline and World NewsTonight.

He has won Emmy awards for a cultural history of Barbie, the world famous doll, for a Frontline investigation of computers and privacy, a George Polk and an Emmy for a look at the Savings & Loan bailout, and the 2010 Essay Prize from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Krulwich also won the AAAS Science Journalism Award for a 2001 a NOVA Special, Cracking the Code of Life, The Extraordinary Communicator Award from the National Cancer Institute, and an Alfred I. Dupont-Columbia Award.
Krulwich earned a BA in history from Oberlin College, a law degree from Columbia University in 1974.

Wendy MacNaughton is an illustrator and graphic journalist whose books include Meanwhile in San Francisco, The City in Its Own Words; Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology; Pen & Ink, Tattoos and The Stories Behind Them; and The Essential Scratch and Sniff Guide to Becoming A Wine Expert. Her work appears in places like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Print Magazine. She lives in San Francisco with two cats, one dog and her partner, writer Caroline Paul.

Wendy’s portofolio.

Follow her on Instagram.