Jacqui Banaszynski is an award-winning reporter who now works as an editor, teacher and coach with other journalists and writers around the world. Her series “AIDS in the Heartland” won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing.

Among her countless other reporting awards, she was a finalist for the 1986 Pulitzer in international reporting for coverage of the Ethiopian famine, and won the US top deadline sports reporting award for coverage of the 1988 Olympics. 

Her edited projects have won ASNE Best Writing, Ernie Pyle Human Interest Writing, and national business, investigative and science-writing prizes. She held an endowed chair professorship at the Missouri School of Journalism for 17 years, where her students’ projects often placed in the Hearst Awards, considered the Pulitzer Prizes of college journalism. 

She is an affiliate faculty member of the renowned Poynter Institute, and served as a long-time editor of Nieman Storyboard, an international website devoted to the art and craft of storywork. In 2008, she was named to the Association of Sunday and Features Editors Features Hall of Fame.

Connect with Jacqui on Facebook.

Jennifer Brandel (she/ they) is co-founder & CEO of Hearken, an award-winning company that helps organizations around the world develop and operationalize participatory processes. Brandel received the Media Changemaker Prize by the Center for Collaborative Journalism, was named one of 30 World-Changing Women in Conscious Business, is a Columbia Sulzberger Fellow, an RSA Fellow, a member of the Guild of Future Architects and the National Civic Collaboratory. 

Brandel led the creation, fundraising and execution of Election SOS, a $2M collaborative initiative to support journalist’s critical information needs around the 2020 US elections. In 2022, she co-created Democracy SOS (now called the Advancing Democracy Fellowship) to support newsrooms making long-term culture shifts in political coverage. She led the creation of the Democracy Toolkit with the Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard, and co-created Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative effort to encourage newsrooms to report on threats to democratic backsliding. 

Brandel is an award-winning journalist, who led the ground-breaking audience-first journalism series Curious City at WBEZ Chicago. She is also co-founder of Zebra’s Unite– a global movement and network of entrepreneurs, funders, investors and allies creating a more ethical, inclusive and collaborative ecosystem for mission-based startups–, and co-founded Civic Exchange Chicago, which brings together civic startups in a collaborative learning community. Connect with Jennifer on LinkedIn and check out her portfolio.

Chris Jones is a long-time writer of non-fiction, known mainly for his work at Esquire magazine, where he won two National Magazine Awards for feature writing: one for The Things That Carried Him, a story about the return of a soldier’s body from Iraq, and Home, which became the basis for his non-fiction book Out of Orbit. 

He has also written for The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, WIRED, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, and ESPN. He has authored three books and is currently at work on a fourth, about the healing powers of soccer. He was a writer and producer for the Netflix series Away, starring Hilary Swank. 

He’s been a frequent guest at The Power of Storytelling, and he’s excited to return for the first time since 2016. In the meantime, he’ll be suffering through a Canadian winter in Port Hope, Ontario, with his two beautiful boys and large collection of soft pants.

Amanda Ripley follows people who have been through transformations to find out what the rest of us can learn. Her most recent book is High Conflict, which chronicles how people get trapped by conflicts of all kinds—and how they get out. The experience of writing that book inspired her to co-found Good Conflict, a media and training company that helps people reimagine conflict.  

Amanda’s previous books include The Unthinkable, which was published in 15 countries and turned into a PBS documentary, and The Smartest Kids in the World, a New York Times bestseller (which also inspired a documentary film).  

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Harvard Business Review and The Times of London. For The Washington Post, POLITICO Magazine and other outlets, she wrote feature stories on what Congress could learn from a former gang leader, the three ingredients missing from the news, and the untold story of the Afghan women who hunted the Taliban. She also spent 10 years working for Time Magazine in New York, Washington and Paris, helping Time win two National Magazine Awards.  

Currently, Amanda lives in Washington, D.C., with her family. She is a trained conflict mediator and a less well-trained youth soccer coach.  Follow Amanda on Instagram and check out her portfolio.

Rachel Louise Snyder is an author and investigative journalist exploring the causes and consequences of the violence that impacts women around the globe. She is the author of No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us, a compelling work of investigative journalism which reveals that one of America’s most urgent social problems takes place behind closed doors, and that the most dangerous place for a woman, statistically, is her own home. 

No Visible Bruises was awarded the New York Public Library’s Bernstein Journalism Award, the 2018 Lukas Work-in-Progress Award from the Columbia School of Journalism and Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, as well as the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism. A finalist for the Kirkus Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, it was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2019 by The New York Times. Snyder’s follow-up, Women We Buried, Women We Burned, recounts her own troubled family story.

As a journalist, Snyder has traveled to more than 60 countries, covering stories about human rights, natural disaster, and war. A contributing writer for The New York Times opinion section, her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, Salon, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and The New Republic. 

She is currently based in Washington, DC, where she is a distinguished professor in creative writing at the American University. Find Rachel on Instagram and explore her portfolio.

Shirish Kulkarni is a journalist, researcher and community organizer, with 30 years of experience working in all the UK’s major broadcast newsrooms, as well as at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. In recent years, his work has focused on developing new ways to build more effective, engaging and inclusive journalism. 

In his current role, as News Innovation Research Fellow of Media Cymru (an innovation hub based in Cardiff University’s School of Journalism), he’s leading the News for All project, aimed at exploring and delivering what those who are most badly served by journalism actually want and need.

Rhiannon White is co-founder and co-director of Common Wealth, where she heads the Welsh artistic programme. Common Wealth are a site-specific political theatre company–making work that speaks to the “here and now”. In 2018, Common Wealth received the Paul Hamlyn Breakthrough Fund and the New Radicals, Nesta Award. 

Rhiannon has worked with National Theatre Wales, National Theatre (UK) ChapterArts Centre, Sherman Cymru, Southbank Centre & Circus 2 Palestine. Rhiannon is a recipient of a Clore Cultural Fellowship and a Creative Wales Award. 

Rhiannon was a panel member on the Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society chaired by Julia Unwin. She was also the community facilitator for the News for All programme, working alongside journalist Shirish Kulkani, Amira Hayat and the BBC. The project explored the future of journalism & how it can best serve marginalised communities. 

Shows in development include The Sea is Mine, a collaboration between women in Cardiff and Jenin, Palestine about travelling beyond your circumstances, and Demand the Impossible, a show about the impact of undercover policing in the UK.

Rhiannon sits on the board of the Grange Pavilion and is on the Aberystwyth Arts Advisory Panel. Find her on Instagram.

Laura Pannack is a London-based photographic artist. Renowned for her portraiture and social documentary work, she seeks to explore the complex relationship between sitter and photographer.

She believes in a process built on a shared experience. Using the camera as a bridge, Laura curiously ventures into the process with limitless expectations with those she photographs, searching for engagement, connection, and a unique experience. 

Many of her projects span over several years allowing the narrative to arise with the development. Largely shooting on analogue film allows her process to be organic rather than being predefined by fixed ideas, introducing chance and fate. 

“The work aims to tell and inspire stories. My aim is to connect and emotionally engage with a viewer. I want you to look at my images and see your own story too.” 

Her work has been exhibited and published worldwide, including at The National Portrait Gallery, The Houses of Parliament, Somerset House, and the Royal Festival Hall in London. 

Over the past 13 years her artwork has won awards such as the John Kobal Award, Vic Odden prize, World Photo Press Awards, Juliet Margaret Cameron award, The Sony World Photo awards, the HSBC Prix de la Photographie prize and the Camera Clara Prize.  

Follow Laura on Instagram and check out her portfolio.