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.

Alison MacAdam is a US-based independent story editor who focuses primarily on audio documentaries. Her work includes The 13th Step, a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Audio Reporting; NPR’s Embedded (“Tested” and “Capital Gazette” series); 544 Days; and Peabody Award winner Believed. In addition to her work within public media, she has edited audio projects for Crooked Media, Vox, NBC, The Center for Public Integrity, and The New Yorker Radio Hour. 

Alison was a 2014 Nieman Fellow at Harvard. Previously, she spent 15 years at NPR, where she rose to Senior Editor of NPR’s flagship afternoon news program All Things Considered. She later became NPR’s Audio Storytelling Specialist, a system-wide training role. 

Alison grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, and lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and son. Other than her family, her true loves are football and her golden retriever. 

Connect with Alison on LinkedIn.

Piero Zagami is an award-winning information designer who transforms complex data into compelling visual narratives that illuminate insights for organizations, brands, and agencies worldwide. With a decade of collaborations alongside industry leaders like Information is Beautiful, Signal Noise, and Beyond Words, Piero honed his craft in making the complex clear and the abstract tangible. Now, from his independent studio in Amsterdam, he continues to push the boundaries of data visualization. 

Piero’s passion extends beyond the craft itself. Through various initiatives, he has helped create platforms that spark dialogue and debate, fostering innovation in this dynamic intersection of design and data. This commitment to community building reflects his belief that the best insights emerge when we collaborate, share, and challenge each other to envision new possibilities.

Check out Piero’s portfolio.

Jacopo Ottaviani is a computer scientist who works as Code for Africa’s Senior Strategist. As an ICFJ Knight Fellow in 2016-2019, Jacopo built teams and programmes supported by the World Bank, Google News Initiative, GIZ and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 

His mix of technical skills, as a computer scientist and data journalist, has resulted in a series of projects published by The Guardian, Der Spiegel, El País and Internazionale. He worked on multiple projects supported by the Pulitzer Center and the European Journalism Center. He is a member of the European Press Prize preparatory committee and works as a trainer with BBC Media Action.

Jacopo’s most recent work combines satellite data with drone imagery and forensic data to produce strategic data aggregations and visualizations that tackle burning social issues, such as urban inequality and immigration, land rights and deforestation.

Take a look at Jacopo’s proudest projects:

• The Migrants’ Files – a transnational data journalism projects on migration to Europe
• Map Makoko – a drone mapping and data journalism project from a Nigerian Slum
• Lungs of the Earth – a data journalism & multimedia project on deforestation in the Congo Basin

Lina Vdovîi is an award-winning freelance reporter from the Republic of Moldova, currently based in Romania. Lina specializes in investigative and narrative journalism, as well as new media. Her articles have appeared in major national and international outlets, including The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and EU Observer. Her work has also been nominated for the European Press Prize.Lina began her filmmaking career producing news segments and documentaries for the German national broadcaster ZDF. She was the screenwriter for the feature documentary  Acasa, my home (Sundance 2020). Tata (TIFF 2024) marks her feature directorial debut.

Connect with Lina on Facebook.

Radu Ciorniciuc is a Romanian filmmaker, cinematographer, and investigative journalist.  

Radu’s debut feature documentary, Acasa, my home, won the Best Cinematography Award at Sundance 2020, and was nominated for a European Film Academy Award.  

In 2012, Radu co-founded Casa Jurnalistului, one of the first independent media organizations in Romania, which brought together a community of reporters specializing in in-depth, long-form, and multimedia reporting. Since then, Radu has contributed as a long-form writer and investigative journalist to major international outlets such as The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and Channel 4 News. His journalism has received both national and international recognition.  

Radu’s work focuses on human rights, animal welfare, and environmental issues. 

Connect with Radu on Facebook.

Arkady Martine is a speculative fiction writer and, as Dr. AnnaLinden Weller, both a historian of the Byzantine Empire and a climate and clean energy policy analyst. Under all her names she writes about border politics, narrative and rhetoric, risk communication, and the edges of the world.

She currently works as the New Mexico Senior Policy Advisor for Clean Energy at Western Resource Advocates, an environmental and clean energy nonprofit, where she specializes in utility regulation and legislative advocacy for energy grid modernization, climate change mitigation, and resiliency planning. 

Her debut novel, A Memory Called Empire (in Romanian, Amintirea imperiului), won the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel, and its sequel, A Desolation Called Peace, won the 2022 Hugo Award in the same category. Her latest novella, Rose/House, was nominated for the 2024 Hugo for Best Novella and won China’s 2024 Fishing Fortress Science Fiction Award for Best International Novella. Rose/House will appear in an international wide release from Tor Publishing Group in March 2025. 

Arkady grew up in New York City, and after some time in Turkey, Canada, Sweden, andBaltimore, lives in New Mexico with her wife, the author Vivian Shaw.

Find Arkady online or on Bluesky.

jesikah maria ross has three speeds: listening, making and sharing. She brings journalists and residents together, creating a path and a plan that changes how we collect, tell and share the stories of our communities. She’s honed her expertise over 25 years of working in newsrooms, universities, community media centers and development organizations around the globe. She makes the media work: for change, for healing, for belonging, for everyone.

jesikah spent the past decade as the Senior Community Engagement Strategist at Capital Public Radio, Sacramento NPR affiliate, co-leading their documentary unit, The View From Here, and directing participatory journalism initiatives, including the award-winning After the Assault. She now works with America Amplified to provide journalists across the U.S. with the skills and resources needed to put engaging with their communities at the center of the reporting process. She also leads the News Futures Care Collaboratory, a collective of journalists, artists and facilitators exploring how to build social connection and civic health through community storytelling.

When she’s not knee deep in a storytelling project, you’ll find jesikah hiking, gardening, making collages or throwing dinner parties.

Connect with jesikah on LinkedIn, check out her portfolio or explore her recent publications:
– JMR’s Participatory Journalism Playbook
– Take Care/Make Care: Dispatches from the News Futures Care Collaboratory
– Taking Care: A Guide to Participatory and Trauma-Informed Reporting

Mara Zepeda is a social entrepreneur. She spent her career at the intersection of community building, economic development, and systems change. 

She is a co-founder of Linestone, a collaborative that supports finding alignment and growing aliveness, and Cola Love, a catalytic community and economic development design studio. Most recently, Mara co-founded and was the Founding Managing Director of Zebras Unite, an international and intersectional hybrid cooperative and non-profit creating a more ethical, inclusive, collaborative, and sustainable approach to building businesses. She is now a Strategic Advisor. 

Prior, Mara was the founder of Switchboard, a venture-backed software company that merged in 2019 with its sister company, Hearken. During her six years in Portland, Oregon, Mara also co-founded and chaired Business for a Better Portland, a 350+ member network driving systemic change and equity, and Xcelerate, a community supporting over 200 women entrepreneurs with resources and mentorship. 

She was an award-winning economic reporter for NPR, Marketplace, Planet Money, The Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer and ran a weekly column for The Philadelphia Weekly for three years. Now based in Columbia, South Carolina, she and her husband, Dr. Andrew Berns, are part of a growing movement in the South dedicated to building communities. 

Check out Mara’s full portfolio and connect with her on LinkedIn.

Chris Wiggins is the Chief Data Scientist at The New York Times and an associate professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University, where he co-founded the executive committee of the Data Science Institute, and of the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, as well as the Department of Systems Biology. He is also an affiliated faculty in Statistics.  

He is a co-founder and co-organizer of hackNY, a nonprofit which since 2010 has organized once a semester student hackathons, and the hackNY Fellows Program, a structured summer internship at NYC startups.  

He was a Courant Instructor at NYU (1998-2001), and earned his PhD at Princeton University (1993-1998) in theoretical physics. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a recipient of Columbia’s Avanessians Diversity Award. His books include How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms (with M. Jones) and award-winning Data Science in Context: Foundations, Challenges, Opportunities (with A. Spector, P. Norvig, J. Wing). 

Connect with Chris.

For Ruxandra Gîdei, local libraries and literature played a determining role in her career path and personal mission. As a literature student, she launched the YouTube channel 4fără15 in 2018, with the initial aim of popularizinging contemporary Romanian literature to her generation through book vlogs and reading challenges. The channel, which brings together over 41,000 book enthusiasts, has since become a space where she builds stories  around her favourite books, while on her Instagram and TikTok accounts, she regularly connects with her followers, challenging them to diversify their reading lists.

Given the visibility she gained in Romania – where book sales and reading rates are among the lowest in the EU –, Ruxandra has made it her goal to explore effective ways to counter this trend, extending her efforts beyond social media. She earned a Research Master’s in Comparative Literary Studies from Utrecht University while remaining involved in coordinating several cultural projects in Romania, including the international poetry festival Z9Festival. Currently, she works for the European Cultural Foundation in Amsterdam, where she helps run The Europe Challenge, an annual initiative supporting libraries leading social change all across Europe.

Connect with Ruxandra.

Raluca Anton is an internationally trained psychotherapist, author, and trainer affiliated with the Imago International Institute. After earning her doctorate in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, she shifted her focus to clinical practice and training new generations of psychotherapists  through the Multicultural Association of Psychology and Psychotherapy and the Imago Therapy Academy Romania, where she is a founding member.

Raluca is the author of Terapie 1 la 1 cu sinele tău (1-on-1 Therapy with Your Self, 2022), and Povestea ta are sens (Your Story Makes Sense, 2024), both of which were bestsellers in Romania. 

She has over 17 years of experience working with people, whether in psychotherapy, counseling, training, or professional development. A key focus of her practice is fostering healthy professional communities, working with leadership teams or entrepreneurs to build mechanisms for healthy relationships within their companies or businesses.Raluca co-hosts With an Open Mind, a weekly TV program airing on Digi24, one of Romania’s most popular TV stations. Since 2018, she has also hosted Mind Games, a podcast focused on scientifically validated psychology. In 2024, Mind Games expanded into a publishing house producing practical tools, such as cards, games and workbooks, to translate psychological insights into daily practices for emotional and relational well-being.

Kate Murphy is a US–based journalist who has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Agence France-Presse, and Texas Monthly. Her eclectic pieces have explored a range of topics including health, technology, design, art, aviation, business, fashion, dining, travel, and real estate. 

Kate is known for her fresh and accessible way of explaining complex subjects, particularly the science behind human interactions, helping readers understand why people behave the way they do. She is the author of You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why it Matters, a blend of cultural observations and scientific exploration aimed at guiding readers in rediscovering the lost art of listening.

Kate also holds a commercial pilot’s license, which she puts to good use when called upon to report from remote locations.