David Paperny is an Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker based in Vancouver. He has directed a dozen documentary features focused on social issues and extraordinary individuals, and received the City of Vancouver Arts Award. In 2014 he was chosen Producer of the Year by Playback Magazine.

Latin America Bureau Chief, Globe & Mail. Former South Asia bureau chief for the Globe and Mail, and former Africa bureau chief. Six-time National Newspaper Award winner for her work in Africa, and four-time recipient of the Amnesty International Award for Human Rights Reporting.

Wade Davis is Professor of Anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. Between 1999 and 2013 he served as Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society and is currently a member of the NGS Explorers Council and Honorary Vice-President of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. Named by the NGS as one of the Explorers for the Millennium, he has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.”

An ethnographer, writer, photographer and filmmaker, Davis holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among fifteen indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations while making some 6000 botanical collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that led to his writing The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), an international best seller later released by Universal as a motion picture. In recent years his work has taken him to East Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, Polynesia, Tibet, Mali, Benin, Togo, New Guinea, Australia, Colombia, Vanuatu, Mongolia and the high Arctic of Nunuvut and Greenland.

Davis is the author of 265 scientific and popular articles and 19 books including One River (1996), The Wayfinders (2009), The Sacred Headwaters (2011), Into the Silence (2011) and River Notes (2012). His photographs have been widely exhibited and have appeared in 30 books and 100 magazines, including National Geographic, Time, Geo, People, Men’s Journal, and Outside. He was the co-curator of The Lost Amazon: The Photographic Journey of Richard Evans Schultes, first exhibited at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, and currently touring Latin America. In 2012 he served as guest curator of No Strangers: Ancient Wisdom in the Modern World, an exhibit at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles.

His many film credits include Light at the Edge of the World, an eight-hour documentary series written and produced for the National Geographic. A professional speaker for 30 years, Davis has lectured at over 200 universities and 250 corporations and professional associations. In 2009 he delivered the CBC Massey Lectures. He has spoken from the main stage at TED five times, and his three posted talks have been viewed by 3 million. His books have appeared in 19 languages and sold approximately one million copies.

Davis is the recipient of 11 honorary degrees, as well as the 2009 Gold Medal from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society for his contributions to anthropology and conservation, the 2011 Explorers Medal, the highest award of the Explorers Club, the 2012 David Fairchild Medal for botanical exploration, the 2013 Ness Medal for geography education from the Royal Geographical Society, and the 2015 Centennial Medal of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University. His recent book, Into the Silence, received the 2012 Samuel Johnson prize, the top award for literary nonfiction in the English language. In 2016 he was made a Member of the Order of Canada.

Robert Cribb is an award-winning investigative reporter at the Toronto Star. He has received national reporting awards and citations for investigations into child exploitation, human trafficking, offshore tax havens, dangerous doctors and public-health threats.

Sandra Bartlett is an award winning freelance reporter and producer based in Toronto. She has worked for CBC Radio where she travelled extensively on assignment; and for NPR’s Investigative Unit in Washington where she collaborated on projects with PBS Frontline, ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity, the Center for Investigative Reporting. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

Janet Tobias is an Emmy award-winning director/producer with 20 years experience working in television for all three American networks, PBS, Discovery, and MSNBC. She is also an adjunct assistant professor of Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in the Department of Population Science and Policy.

Kwabena Adu Korganteng is a investigative journalist currently working for the New Crusading Guide. He was recently awarded an IFEJ Flamingo award for his investigative work in resource extraction and exploitation.

Melissa Chan is a national and foreign affairs reporter. She was a broadcast correspondent for Al Jazeera America and Al Jazeera English, where she served as China correspondent for five years before her expulsion from the country in 2012 for the channel’s reports. She has also reported from Cuba, Canada, South Korea, North Korea, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Mongolia, Moscow, Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Gaza. She was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. She is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Robert Semeniuk has been a full-time, freelance author, photojournalist, human and environmental rights activist for over thirty years. He has worked for most of the world’s major magazines and newspapers in over 100 countries, and a dozen war zones.

Jere Van Dyk is a former Carnegie Council Senior Fellow, and has worked as an international affairs reporter for more than 30 years, primarily covering Central Asia for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and others.

Blogger and Journalist. Writes and reports on national security and military affairs for the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and NBC News. He was a former Policy Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.

Edward Burtynsky is known as one of Canada’s most respected photographers. His remarkable photographic depictions of global industrial landscapes are included in the collections of over sixty major museums around the world, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, the Tate Modern in London, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California.

Martha Mendoza is a Pulitzer prize-winning writer at the Associated Press. She is based in Silicon Valley where she provides breaking news, enterprise and investigative reporting. Mendoza focused on human trafficking in 2015, cybersecurity in 2014 and covered Latin America from 2010 to 2013. Mendoza was a 2001 Knight Fellow at Stanford University and a 2007 Ferris Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. She also teaches in the graduate University of California, Santa Cruz Science Communications Program and is a senior fellow at the Institute for Justice and Journalism.

Donna De Cesare is a freelance video journalist and the Recipient of the Maria Moors Cabot Award for Journalism Enhancing InterAmerican Understanding, the oldest award for foreign correspondence. She teaches at UT and reports on Latin America.

Farah’s work is known for its quiet intimacy. Her long-term projects have focused primarily on the war’s impact on Iraqis, and the last speakers of highly threatened languages. The award-winning photographer has worked on assignment in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Syria, the West Bank, Gaza, and Egypt. Her work appeared in leading international publications including The New York Times and TIME. Nosh appeared on CNN’s Inside the Middle East segment entitled “Someone You Should Know,” which features personalities making an impact in the region. She currently lives in Vancouver with her family.

Tara Sutton is a filmmaker and war correspondent, who has reported in conflict zones around the world, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, Colombia, and Liberia. She has received numerous awards, including the Amnesty International Award for Television News for her un-embedded coverage of the battle of Fallujah.

Editor. Kim Frank began working as a video editor in 2004, after a long career as a contemporary dancer and choreographer. She edited the Emmy Award winning documentary Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground for PBS Frontline World, and the Emmy nominated In a Small Town for PBS Exposé. Other credits include documentaries for the Discovery Channel, PBS and Omni and news pieces for CNBC, Business Nation, and Dan Rather Reports.

Ali Mustafa is correspondent with TRT World, the Turkish public broadcaster’s English news network. Ali has previously reported for Al Jazeera English, CBC/Radio-Canada and VICE News. He has covered politics, security and society in Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and North America since 2004.

Gary Marcuse is a journalist and filmmaker based in Vancouver, Canada. He has written and directed several films about the emergence of environmental movements around the world. He is a former programming executive for CBC Television in Vancouver and a former chair of the Documentary Organization of Canada.

Lynsey Addario is an American photojournalist based in London, England, where she photographs for The New York Times, National Geographic, and Time. Addario has shot features across the Middle East, South Asia and Africa, covered conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Darfur and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Betsy Carson is an award-winning producer, executive producer and director with over 25 years experience in documentary film and television. Her work focuses on a number of issues, including environmental movements and post-traumatic stress in the military.

Paul Watson is a Canadian reporter, photojournalist and author. He is also the former South Asian bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times. He won a 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography for his photo of the civil war in Somalia.

Adithya Sambamurthy is a documentary maker living in Oakland, California. An Emmy and Peabody award-winning producer, he’s worked on projects for the Guardian, the New York Times, National Geographic, PBS Newshour, PBS Frontline and a number of independent productions.

Joel Bakan is a filmmaker, author, and professor at the UBC Peter A. Allard School of Law. Joel’s 2004 book The Corporation has won widespread acclaim, with its film adaptation earning 25 international awards. He is currently working on the book’s sequel while sitting as a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Centre in Italy.

The Renaud Brothers are documentary filmmakers, television producers, and film programmers. Their films, and television shows have won major awards including an IDA Award for Best TV Series, two Overseas Press Club Awards, two Columbia DuPonts, and an Edward R. Murrow Award.

Mary Kay Magistad, an award-winner journalist and podcaster who often focuses on undercovered long-term trends and social justice issues, lived and reported in East Asia and beyond for more than two decades, first in Southeast Asia for The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, NPR, CBC and others, then in China, opening NPR’s Beijng bureau and returning for PRI/BBC’s The World. Her podcast, “Whose Century Is It?,” a 2017 Webby Awards honoree, looks at ideas, trends and twists shaping the 21st century.

Dan McKinney received his MJ at University of California Berkeley (’02). As an accomplished videographer, he has shot and produced projects for ABC News, PBS, Al Jazeera, History Channel, National Geographic Channel and others.

Jonah Kessel is a freelance visual media journalist based in Beijing, China, currently working with The New York Times video desk. Kessel’s work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, The Economist, Atlantic Monthly, among other publications.

Andrew Revkin is the founder of The New York Times’ influential Dot Earth blog, where he writes about the global environment, climate change and natural disasters. He is now a senior fellow at the Pace University Academy for Applied Environmental Studies. He is a senior reporter at ProPublica.

Dionne Bunsha is an award-winning journalist from Mumbai, India. She has written extensively on a diverse range of human rights, social justice, and environmental issues. She is the author of, Scarred: Experiments with Violence in Gujarat (Penguin India, 2006) about the aftermath of religious violence in Gujarat, India.

Egyptian-Canadian award-winning journalist and author. Worked for CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera and entered Iraq in 2003 on the first day of the invasion to cover the war for the Los Angeles Times. In 2007 he joined the protection team of the ICRC in Lebanon, protecting the rights of political prisoners, refugees and the missing. In 2011, he was honored with a Peabody Award along with the CNN team for the coverage of the Arab Spring. In 2013 he accepted a post as the Al Jazeera English Egypt bureau chief. In 2013 Fahmy was arrested alongside two colleagues and accused of conspiring with a terrorist group and fabricating news. He was pardoned in September 2015 and took a job as the Global Reporting Centre’s Journalist in Residence. He has co-authored a book titled the Marriott Cell: An Epic Journey from Cairo’s Scorpion Prison to Freedom

Mellissa Fung is currently completing the Fellowship for International Development Reporting. She is a former National Correspondent for CBC News. She recipient of the 2009 Commonwealth Broadcasting Association Award.

Salimah Ebrahim is a print, broadcast and photojournalist who has reported on the war in Iraq, numerous G8 and G20 summits, the White House and environmental security challenges in Africa. She worked on assignment for Reuters, CBC Television, the Globe and Mail, the Cairo Times and A&E’s Biography Channel.

Jennifer Yang is an award-winning journalist with the Toronto Star, where she currently writes about identity and inequality. Previously, Jennifer covered the global health beat for four years, writing from Bhutan, Iceland, Japan, Geneva, Malawi and Sierra Leone, where she was the first Canadian journalist to cover the 2014 Ebola outbreak from West Africa. Jennifer is a two-time UN Foundation press fellow and won a National Newspaper Award for her explanatory feature on the 2010 Chilean mining disaster.

Allison Griner is a freelance foreign correspondent whose work has appeared in Al Jazeera, the Washington Post, Esquire and Reveal, among others. She was recently based in Beijing, China, where she reported on environmental issues and human rights.

Mei Fong is an author and journalist who covered Hong Kong and China for the Wall Street Journal. She is the winner of the Pulitzer, as well as awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, Society of Publishers in Asia and Amnesty International.

Veronique de Viguerie is a Combat Photojournalist, and has covered an Afghan guerrilla group responsible for the Uzbin Valley ambush, pirates in Somalia, and Taliban militants. She has been awarded the Best War Photo Reportage award, a World Press Photo award, and the Canon Prize for Female Photojournalist.

Ed Ou is an award-winning photojournalist based in Istanbul, Turkey. He has worked for Reuters, the Associated Press, and The New York Times. Since 2006 Ou has covered the war between Israel and Hezbollah, the fall of the Islamic Courts in Mogadishu, Somalia and a range of other stories in the Middle East.

Kevin Patterson is a novelist and journalist from British Columbia, Canada. He has won the Roger Writers’ Trust prize for fiction and has written about war, tuberculosis, escapism, and acculturation. He also practices medicine in Nunavut on the west coast of Hudson Bay and in the ICU in Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island. He has sailed across the Pacific Ocean in a concrete boat a few times.

Gary Knight is an award-winning photojournalist who has covered the civil war in Yugoslavia, the war in Iraq, Israel/Palestine, North Korea, the invasion of Afghanistan, the civil war in Kashmir and the Asian Tsunami. He is the founder of the photo agency VII, which represents some of the world’s top photojournalists.

Walt Bogdanich is an investigative journalist for the New York Times. He has won three Pulitzer Prizes for his work, the most recent being his “Toxic Pipleline” feature on tainted Chinese imports. He is currently teaching at the Columbia School of Journalism as an adjunct faculty member.

Dorothée Myriam Kellou is an award-winning French journalist and filmmaker based in Paris. Her three-part series on the French company Lafarge’s deal with ISIS militants in Syria was awarded the TRACE International Prize for Investigative Reporting. She is currently developing “Algeria, Out of Place”, a documentary about forced resettlement during the Algerian War of Independence.

Deborah Campbell is the author of the nonfiction books This Heated Place and A Disappearance in Damascus. She has reported from Iran, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, the UAE, Qatar, Israel, Palestine, Cuba, Mexico, and Russia. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Economist, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, New Scientist, The Walrus, and other publications. She has won three National Magazine Awards for her foreign correspondence and has guest lectured at Harvard, Berkeley, and Zayed University in Dubai. She currently teaches at the University of British Columbia.

Executive Chairperson of Democracy Works Foundation, former Deputy Editor at The Sowetan. Senior associate and Oppenheimer fellow at St, Antony’s College, Oxford, and author of Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC.

Echo is a researcher in the Christian Science Monitor Beijing Bureau, where she helps to do stories on environment, public policy and international affairs. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, China Dialogue, and Chinese online media Jiemian News. 

Garrett Hinchey is an award-winning multimedia journalist specializing in digital projects and working for CBC North in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada. His work has appeared in CBC.ca, the Globe and Mail, ESPN, and Up Here Magazine. A born and raised Yellowknifer and member of the North Slave Metis Alliance, Hinchey won the Joan Donaldson CBC News Scholarship in 2014 and was a finalist for the Canadian Journalism Foundation’s Innovation Award in 2016 for his work connecting remote communities in the lead up to the Northwest Territories election.

Umbreen Butt is a documentary filmmaker working between North America and Asia. She has freelanced with CBS, AlJazeera and the BBC, as well as with the UN and other humanitarian and environmental organizations. Her work focuses on health, the environment and equity.

Jimmy Thomson is a journalist based in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. He has been published in CBC, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, National Geographic, VICE, and others, while working in every Arctic country in the world. He has been a recipient of awards from the SPJ, RTDNA, CAJ, and two federal governments.

Peter Mothe’s work has been published by CBC Aboriginal, the Globe and Mail, the Georgia Straight, EDGE YK in Yellowknife and the literary blog Escritores del Mundo. He specializes on international indigenous issues.

Olívia Zauli Fellows is a project manager at the Global Reporting Centre. She is a graduate of the UBC School of Journalism and former fellow of the International Reporting Program. Olivia has published pieces in The Globe and Mail and The Tyee, Discovery Channel Canada and currently works as a video producer.

Alberto is an award winning journalist and filmmaker based in Vancouver; he focuses on natural sciences, sustainability and social justice. He is a firm supporter of media and knowledge co-production, promoter of information democratization by offering multimedia projects showcasing a diversity of voices, intersectional content and contextual facts to audiences of different backgrounds. His journalist work on rare diseases in Canada bestowed him with the Edward Murrow and the Jack Webster awards as the team leader of a collaborative team of journalists, academics, physicians, researchers, patients and their families.