Rima Abdelkader is a senior reporter and producer at NBC News in New York. She became interested in the field of Social Newsgathering while studying at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism. In addition to mining for and verifying information online, she manages a team of reporters across different time zones and assigns deadline-driven stories. In 2013, she joined Al Jazeera America where she reported and produced for the weekly news magazine program ‘Ali Velshi on Target’ before returning to NBC in 2016. Abdelkader has been teaching digital news reporting and verification at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism since 2020. She has also served as a board member of AMEJA, the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association.

Grethel Aguila is the Daily Enterprise Reporter at the Miami Herald, where she balances a mix of general assignment, enterprise and breaking news. She covers a wide array of topics, ranging from court and religion to politics and immigration and works towards being a foreign correspondent. Grethel graduated from the University of Florida in 2022 with a dual degree in journalism and Arabic. She is passionate about the Arab world and makes it her mission to seek diverse voices in her reporting. She speaks Spanish and Arabic and loves animals, traveling, basketball and good storytelling.

Ariel Sophia Bardi is a writer, scholar, and multimedia journalist. She obtained her Ph.D. in comparative literature in 2015 from Yale University with a focus on visual culture and postcolonial studies. Her work has been featured in multiple scholarly publications including an upcoming book on cultural heritage disputes. As a journalist, she has reported from Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Armenia, Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, Mexico, Israel, and the West Bank for outlets such as The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, Slate, and Al Jazeera. She is is currently an adjunct professor in the journalism department of Temple University in Rome.

Youcef O. Bounab, a native Algerian living in the United States since 2018, graduated from the University of Algiers in 2017 and the City University of New York in 2022. Before coming to the United States, Bounab worked with some of Algeria’s leading newspapers including Liberté, El Watan, and Le Quotidien d’Oran, where he covered a variety of topics. After moving to New York, his focus shifted towards international affairs with an eye for the Middle East and North Africa and he covers the region as a freelancer. An Overseas Press Club awardee, he will report from the Middle East for the Associated Press starting in July 2023.

Chris Ehrmann is an Emmy-nominated journalist and documentary filmmaker from the metro-Detroit area. He has worked with news organizations like The Associated Press, Report For America, GroundTruth Project, USA Today, and Vogue India. His first documentary, about homelessness in Oregon garnered him an Emmy nomination in 2019. Chris is finishing his master’s degree at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism specializing in documentary. His thesis film focuses on an indigenous Colombian woman trying to heal the damaged relationship with medicinal plants caused by the war on drugs. Named the Brian Pollack Fellow at UC Berkeley, he hopes to shoot his next documentary in Cairo.

Benjamin Lotto is a journalist based out of New York and is originally from Montana. He has done Arabic and English editorial work for Al Jazeera, The New York Times, and the Council on Foreign Relations, and has written in English and Arabic for Raseef22. He is very interested in covering the intersection between cybersecurity and human rights, particularly in the Middle East region. In his free time, Lotto judges Arabic debates and teaches self-defense.

Taylor Luck has been the Middle East North Africa correspondent at The Christian Science Monitor since 2014. He reports from across the Arab world, bringing The Monitor’s value-lens approach to the coverage of regional news events. Prior to The Monitor, Taylor reported on the Syrian war and refugee crisis from Jordan as a special correspondent for The Washington Post and on Arab politics as a correspondent at The German Press Agency (dpa). Taylor began his career in 2007 as a local news editor at Jordan’s English-language daily newspaper The Jordan Times, working with Jordanian journalists while reporting on politics and refugee affairs. The Chicago native has lived in the Arab world for most of his adult life, striving to report “from” communities rather than “on” them as an outsider.

Mateo Nelson is a journalist and Arabic-to-English translator based in New York. He is the English Editor of Syria Direct, an independent media and training organization covering Syria in Arabic and English. Originally from Montana, he holds a joint MA in Journalism and Near Eastern Studies from New York University, and a BA in Near Eastern Studies and Arabic from Princeton University. He was a 2014-2015 Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) fellow in Amman, and a 2020 Overseas Press Club Foundation Scholar Award winner. Mateo has reported in Jordan, Lebanon, Germany and the United States.

Chanan Tigay is an award-winning journalist and author whose work has appeared in print and online in the New Yorker, Smithsonian, the Atlantic, and GQ, among others. A former Jerualem correspondent for AFP, his book, The Lost Book of Moses, won the Anne & Robert Cowan Writers Prize, was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize, was an Amazon Best Nonfiction selection, and was optioned for television. His next book, Serpents in the Garden, is forthcoming from Public Affairs. He was a fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute and is a professor at SFSU. His article on Holocaust rescuer Aristides de Sousa Mendes was recently optioned for film.

Sabrina Toppa is an award-winning journalist based in Texas. Her stories have been published by The Guardian, TIME Magazine, The Washington Post, NBC News, Public Radio International, and Al Jazeera English, among other outlets. She previously worked in the offices of Mother Jones in San Francisco, TIME Magazine in Hong Kong, The Dhaka Tribune, The Kathmandu Post, and in Pakistan for several years. In 2016, she was a Panos South Asia fellow reporting on migrants in the Middle East. Her reporting from Pakistan won the 2018 Humanitarian Reporting Award from the International Committee of the Red Cross.