Aaron Rasmussen is an entrepreneur, inventor, and game designer. He's best known as a founder of educational platforms MasterClass and Outlier.org, the latter known for creating impactful for-credit online college courses with the aim of promoting affordable, equitable education. Students at Outlier receive transcripted transferable credits from the University of Pittsburgh. Outlier recently launched associate degrees with Golden Gate University that cost less than the average Pell Grant award enabling students to receive an education at zero cost to them. At MasterClass, Rasmussen was both Creative Director and CTO, creating courses taught by notable experts. The video game he co-wrote, BlindSide, has won multiple awards and is being adapted into a film.

Abduweli Ayup is a writer, activist and linguist specializing in Uyghur language education. He spent nine years lecturing in Northwest Minzu University and Xinjiang Financial and Economics University. Abduweli opened language schools and kindergartens in the city of Ürumchi and Kashgar in 2011. Following his arrest in August 2013, accused of promoting separatist activity, Abduweli spent 15 months in detention, before fleeing from China to Turkey with his family. In 2016, Abduweli founded Uyghur Hjelp, a non profit Uyghur human rights advocacy, documentation and humanitarian aid organization. Since 2019, Abduweli has lived in Bergen as a writer-in-residence through the ICORN program. He has published six books in Uyghurs. His first English book will be published in September 2024 by Silkie Publishing House.

Adam Pincus is an award-winning creative executive with a background that includes scripted and nonfiction television, narrative and documentary film, audio and digital content. He has been an independent producer, a network executive and head of an independent studio. Along the way he’s been awarded a Peabody, an Emmy, a Webby, a BDA Gold for broadcast design, and the Cannes Lion; his projects have been nominated for Gotham, Independent Spirit, and Academy Awards. In 2019, Pincus founded Best Case Studios, a producer of narrative audio series, film and TV, which has included two innovative “podcast movies” for C13Features. Prior to Best Case, Pincus helped found Topic Studios, where he was Executive Vice President, Programming & Content. He is an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and in the Entertainment, Media and Technology Program at NYU’s Leonard H. Stern School of Business. He has been a writer for numerous film publications and Contributing Editor for FILMMAKER Magazine.

Alice Zhuravel is a Ukrainian social researcher and entrepreneur who engages in cross-disciplinary activity aimed at fostering positive, cohesive, and sustainable futures. Over the past two years, in response to the polycrisis following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Alice has been actively engaged in humanitarian and social work. Drawing upon her professional background at the intersection of humanitarianism and creativity, this year Alice founded TOZHSAMIST, a social initiative that’s an experiential platform for multidisciplinary discussion aimed at creating a more cohesive and sustainable future. Raised in Ukrainian society as a biracial person, Alice brings to the forefront an intercultural and multi-perspective mindset. Alice studied History (BSc: Kharkiv, Ukraine), and researched Ukrainian Identity as a fellow at CIRCE (Creative Impact Research Center Europe, Berlin, Germany).

Anusha Alikhan is Chief Communications Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, the global nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, one of the top 10 most visited websites in the world. Before joining the Wikimedia Foundation, she was communications director for Knight Foundation, a leading funder of journalism and media innovation. She previously served as a communications officer with the United Nations advancing global peacekeeping initiatives, and has worked as a freelance journalist and editor covering local news and events in New York City. Before that, Anusha practiced employment and human rights law in her hometown of Toronto, Canada. She serves on the boards of The Communications Network and National Urban Fellows.

Bao Nguyen is an Emmy-nominated Vietnamese-American filmmaker whose work has appeared on HBO, Netflix, the New York Times, and ESPN among many others. He directed Be Water, a deep dive into the life and journey of Bruce Lee, which competed in the U.S. Documentary Competition category at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and was broadcast nationally on ESPN, becoming the most watched ESPN 30 for 30 film ever. His latest film, The Greatest Night in Pop, a feature documentary about the making of the seminal global hit song, "We Are the World", world premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival and launched globally on Netflix. In addition to his directing work, he is a partner at EAST Films, a production company based in Vietnam looking to elevate Vietnamese cinema domestically and abroad.

Betelihem Melkamu Essa's story begins in Geza, a rural village in the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region (SNNPR) of Ethiopia, where she spent the first decade of her life in a close-knit community without electricity, running water, or cell phones but with love, community, and hope. In 2015, at the age of 10, Essa was adopted and moved to Mexico City with her mother. She attended The American School Foundation, where she was a member of the Cross Country and Track and Field teams. After three and a half years, they relocated to California, where Essa attended Girls Middle School and Menlo School. Essa held roles in student government and at Object, a non-profit organization that hosts inspirational talks by successful women to empower young girls. In 2020, Essa was selected as a T-Mobile ChangeMaker for her work with Object, participating in workshops co-led by John Legere and Nadya Okamoto.

Branko Brick started his book publishing career in 1984 in what was then Yugoslavia. The highlights included the complete works of William Shakespeare, Complete Greek Tragedies and Miroslav’s Gospel, the Serbian nation’s holiest book, which was included in Unesco’s Memory of the World upon re-publication. In South Africa, Branko launched, and edited, several publications, including the magazines Timbila, Brainstorm, Maverick and Empire, and the newspaper 168, South Africa’s final weekend newspaper. In late 2009, Branko launched Daily Maverick, an online daily with readership of 12-million monthly unique visitors as of 20 March 2023. In June 2018, Branko won Nat Nakasa Award for Media Integrity, considered South Africa’s premier journalism award. The #GuptaLeaks, Daily Maverick’s most famous contribution so far, in collaboration with amaBhungane and News24, brought many more awards, among them the 2019 Global Shining Light Award, shared with Maria Ressa’s The Rappler in Philippines.

Erica Benner is a political philosopher and historian of ideas. Born in Tokyo, she grew up in Japan and the UK and has taught at Oxford, Yale, and the LSE. Erica currently teaches at the Hertie School for Governance in Berlin and LSE Ideas in London. Her fifth and most recent book, Adventures in Democracy: The Turbulent World of People Power (Penguin Allen Lane 2024), was a Financial Times pick for What to Read in 2024. Her other books include Be Like the Fox (Penguin Allen Lane 2017), a biography of Machiavelli that was shortlisted for the Elizabeth Longford Prize and a BBC Book of the Week.

Galen Hooks is a VMA-nominated choreographer, performer, and director who has worked with over 70 artists, from Camila Cabello, Justin Bieber, The Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus, to Janet Jackson, Britney Spears, Usher and Rihanna. Her theater work includes Associate Co-Choreographer for the Broadway revival of Dreamgirls. Producing credits include America’s Got Talent  (Associate Consulting Producer), The Voice (Associate Performance  Producer), Disney Channel Presents: Radio Disney’s Family VIP Birthday  (Executive Producer and Creative Director), and YouTube’s “Masterclass“ (Consulting Producer and Host). She has won multiple World Choreography Awards and performs everywhere from The Oscars, The Guggenheim and the Super Bowl, to iconic music videos. Galen now shares invaluable knowledge through her life-changing  intensives, The Galen Hooks Method, which uses dance to transform students of any background and ability.

Gary Shteyngart is The New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Little Failure and the novels Super Sad True Love Story, Lake Success, Absurdistan, and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook. For his books, he has been a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His books regularly appear on best-of lists around the world and have been published in 30 countries. His latest novel, Our Country Friends, was a New York Times bestseller and was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Time magazine, Kirkus Review, and others.

Jake Friedman is a manager and producer who has contributed to numerous #1 albums, sold-out tours, and critically acclaimed works in music, theater, and film. He launched his own record label at the age of 19 and led We Are Free Management for a decade. In 2019, he co-founded Crush Works, where he manages artists across multiple disciplines while producing notable works like 'Derek DelGaudio's In & Of Itself' for Disney+ and 'Neal Brennan: Blocks' on Netflix.

Joe Sabia oversees creative development of digital channels at Conde Nast Entertainment, leading the creation of franchises across the portfolio, as well as being the creator and interviewer of Vogue’s 400 million-view celebrity interview franchise, "73 Questions”. Joe started his career as a founder of a digital lab at HBO, where his independent directing and remixing career took off with a viral recap of every season of the Sopranos. In 2010, he gave a TED talk on storytelling, co-hosted Boing Boing TV on Virgin America airlines. He sits on the programming board of The Moth, and is co-founder of the YouTube channel “CDZA”, a 300,000-subscriber channel. As a one-man creative shop, he has created ideas and videos for such companies as Google, CFDA Fashion Awards, Interscope Records, BBC America, Comcast, ATT, and others. Joe is the most ardent American fan of Georgia and unofficial ambassador. He has been to Georgia 16 times since 2006, can read and write kartuli, co-owned Piano (on Tabidze street), and currently co-owns DASTA.

Jon Lee Anderson is an internationally recognised journalist, author, and war correspondent. He began his reporting career in the early 1980s, chronicling Central America’s civil wars for TIME magazine and other journals. As a New Yorker staff writer since 1998, he has covered numerous international conflicts, including those in Syria, Ukraine, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, Angola, Mali, Liberia, and Central African Republic. Anderson’s work has also appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, El Pais, Internazionale, The Financial Times, and other publications. Jon Lee has also written about well-known contemporary figures, such as Gabriel García Márquez, Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, Augusto Pinochet, Spain’s King Juan Carlos, and Saddam Hussein. He is the author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, Guerrillas: Journeys in the Insurgent World, The Fall of Baghdad, and several other books. He has won a number of awards and distinctions, including several from the Overseas Press Club, as well as the Maria Moors Cabot Gold Medal for his reporting on Latin America. Jon Lee is on a number of journalism award juries, including the Swiss-based True Story Award, the Michael Jacobs Travel Writing Fund, and as a member of the board of directors of the Fundación Gabo (formerly New Journalism Foundation), founded by Gabriel García Márquez, he helps choose winners for the annual Premios Gabo. Once a year, he gives workshops to young Latin American reporters.

Julia Watson is a food writer and has contributed to publications including The Observer, The Sunday Times, the Mail on Sunday, the Washington Post, Gourmet, The National Interest and other outlets. She has also broadcast on NPR. For almost a decade she was the Food Writer for international news agency United Press International and ran her own food web site, eatWashington.com. She twice won Gourmand International’s award for World’s Best French Cookbook. Bruno's Cookbook has just been published by Knopf in the US and by Quercus in the UK.

Julie Posetti is the Global Director of Research at the International Center for Journalists. She previously was a Senior Research Fellow at the RISJ and led the Journalism Innovation Project at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. She researches at the intersection of journalism, digital media, and freedom of expression. Posetti is the author of Protecting Journalism Sources in the Digital Age (UNESCO 2017) and the co-editor of Journalism, ‘Fake News’ and Disinformation (UNESCO 2018). She was awarded her PhD in December 2018, and her academic research has been published internationally in peer reviewed journals and scholarly books. Dr Posetti brings over two decades of high-level international journalism practice to her research, including time as a news editor, documentary reporter and national political correspondent with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). She has been awarded the Australian Human Rights Awards for Radio, and the Australian National Press Club’s ‘German Award for Journalism’. More recently, her work has been published by The Atlantic, Harvard University’s Nieman Lab, the BBC, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian.

Kira Brunner Don is the Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of Stranger’s Guide, a travel publication that explores the power of place-based journalism. She has worked as a magazine editor in New York for 17 years and as a journalist in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. She has received two National Magazine Awards for General Excellence in her role as Editor-in-Chief of Stranger’s Guide and one National Magazine Award in Photography for her photo curation. In 2022, she was named the FOLIO: Eddie and Ozzie Award’s Editor of the Year. She is co-editor of the book The New Killing Fields: Massacre and the Politics of Intervention and was the co-founder of the Oakland Book Festival.

Marisa Mazria Katz is a journalist and radio reporter whose work has been featured in The New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Vogue, NPR, and more. In 2009, she initiated a journalism program for teens in Casablanca, Morocco, funded by the US State Department. Katz served as the founding editor of Creative Time Reports, a media site from public art nonprofit Creative Time that highlighted artists' perspectives on current issues, and collaborated with major news organizations like The Guardian and The Intercept. In 2018, she launched the Eyebeam Center for the Future of Journalism with support from Craig Newmark Philanthropies. Recently, Marisa co-founded the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting, fostering journalist-artist collaborations. She teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Matthew Janney is a British-Georgian writer based in London and a former editor at TANK magazine. He writes about literature, culture and the Caucasus and his work has appeared in the Guardian, the Financial Times, the New Statesman, Coda Story, the Times Literary Supplement, and others. Before writing, Matthew played international rugby for Georgia.

Matthew Pye has been a teacher for over 20 years, first in the UK, then Germany and now for 14 years in Brussels. For over a decade, he has worked with leading scientists in sustainability, with a focus on climate change. Most notably, in 2011 in collaboration with Michael Wadleigh, Oscar winning director of ‘Woodstock’ (1970) and Birgit van Munster, he established the Climate Academy. This innovative work to hothouse small groups of students in the science and social realities of climate change was recognized by the offer of Full Membership to the Club of Rome (EU Chapter) in 2016. He has given numerous lectures on Climate Change and systems thinking, at the European Commission, Cambridge University, VU (Amsterdam), St Louis University (Brussels) and most recently in Kazakhstan; alongside talks and workshops in different schools in Europe. He co-authored the recent and widely applauded Philosophy syllabus (2019) for the European School system. His latest book, "Plato Tackles Climate Change" (2020) has recently been followed up with "Arendt Tackles Climate Change" (2024).

Merve Emre is an award-winning writer and critic. She is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. Her books, which include Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, The Personality Brokers, The Ferrante Letters, and The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, have been selected as best books by the New York Times, The Economist and NPR, and won the 2021 PROSE award for literature. She has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker.

Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer. She is the co-author of Brothers of the Gun, an illustrated collaboration with Syrian war journalist Marwan Hisham, which was a New York Times Notable Book and long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award. Her memoir, Drawing Blood, received global praise and attention. Her animated films have been nominated for three Emmys and won an Edward R. Murrow Award. Molly’s reportage has been published in the New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, The New Yorker and Rolling Stone. She was the 2019 artist-in-residence at NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies in 2019, a New America fellow in 2020, and the winner of the Bernhardt Labor Journalism Award in 2022. Currently, she is a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, working on a history of the Jewish Labor Bund.

Monique Maddy is a multicultural entrepreneur, author, and innovator devoted to improving the everyday lives of people across Africa. In her 30-year career, she has held senior positions at Google and Apple and launched her own entrepreneurial ventures to amplify African voices and influence on the global stage. At Apple, she successfully developed and executed the company’s Apple Pay strategy in Latin America and subsequently its payments strategy for Apple media products (App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV, iCloud) in Latin America and Africa. She also founded a disruptive digital wallet platform that was incubated by Google and rolled out in Mexico, and she brought mobile cellular service to Africa. Through Unite in Africa and Out of Omo, Monique is partnering with industry leaders inside and outside Africa to identify, invest in, and promote the countless business opportunities in the media and fintech sectors. She is also the published author of Learning to Love Africa: My Journey from Africa to Harvard Business School and Back (HarperCollins, 2004), drawing on her personal experiences in Africa and her MBA at Harvard Business School. Her articles have been published in TechCrunch and Harvard Business Review.

Nadia is a writer and pianist. She is a regular contributor to the Financial Times and her articles, essays, and criticism also appear in publications including The New Yorker, National Geographic, the Guardian, and the Times Literary Supplement among several others. She was editor-in-chief of The Calvert Journal, an award-winning magazine covering contemporary art, culture and society in Russia, Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus. Prior to that, she was Moscow correspondent for The Independent. Her first book, a memoir on music, life and the art of amateurism, will be out in 2025/26 by WW Norton and Faber & Faber.

Nic Dawes is Executive Director of THE CITY, an nonprofit newsroom that serves the people of New York through investigative reporting that helps them hold the powerful to account, and service journalism that makes it easier to navigate daily life. He was previously deputy executive director of Human Rights Watch, Editor in Chief of the Mail and Guardian in Johannesburg, and Chief Content Officer of Hindustan Times. He serves as board president of Coda Media.

Pekka Kallioniemi (PhD) is a Finnish expert on social media and disinformation. He works as an independent consultant and as postdoctoral researcher on human-technology interaction at Tampere University. Besides researching state-of-the-art technologies, he's also studied Russian online information operations and disinformation. In his current work, he combines these topics, studying how online information operations and disinformation may change in the future with the adoption of technologies such as ChatGPT, deep fakes, and generative AI. Kallioniemi has been publishing the popular "vatnik soup" series on Twitter since October 2022 and has been a regular commentator on national and international media. Since January 2023, he’s worked as a columnist for the British newspaper Byline Times, and his work has been covered in Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Die Welt.

A Glasgow-native turned global storyteller, Quentin Sommerville has built a career reporting on the world's most dangerous hotspots. His early days as a Shanghai and Beijing correspondent honed his skills for navigating across cultures, while his three-year stint as the BBC’s Afghanistan correspondent brought him face-to-face with the human cost of conflict. Now based in Beirut, Sommerville covers the Middle East, from the ongoing conflicts in Libya and Syria to further afield in Eastern Ukraine. Through his insightful reporting, he gives a voice to those living in the midst of turmoil, offering viewers a glimpse into the dark reality of war.

Raju Narisetti is the Leader of Global Publishing at McKinsey & Company. As part of a 35-year global career in publishing, Raju spent 14 years as a journalist at The Wall Street Journal. He was also Managing Editor of The Washington Post, where he shaped its print/digital transformation. Raju is also the founder of India’s Mint (livemint.com), a national business newspaper. As a business executive, he was SVP of Strategy for News Corp., and later CEO of the Gizmodo Media Group. Prior to joining McKinsey in 2020, he was a Professor at Columbia University’s School of Journalism where he also oversaw the Knight Bagehot Fellowships in Business Journalism. Raju is a Trustee of Wikimedia Foundation, which manages Wikipedia globally, and on the board of Restofworld.org, a non-profit reporting from places typically overlooked and underestimated.

Ryan Broderick is a tech journalist and the author of the award-winning Garbage Day newsletter. He also writes for publications such as Fast Company, The Verge, and Rest Of World. His work has taken to over 22 countries and he's also met a lot of internet famous animals.

Salar Abdoh is a novelist, essayist and translator. His books include The Poet Game, Opium, Tehran At Twilight and the crime compilation that he edited and translated, Tehran Noir. His novel, Out of Mesopotamia (2020), was a New York Times Editors’ Pick and selected as a Best Book of 2020 by Publishers Weekly, called “one of the great war novels of our time.” His latest book is A Nearby Country Called Love, published in the fall of 2023. He is also a Director of Creative Writing at the City University of New York and lives between Tehran and New York City.

Shazna Nessa is an American, British-Bangladeshi writer, currently writing Beneath the Same Stars, a literary memoir about a girl’s escape from child marriage, which ultimately leads her to a decades-long pursuit of an ever-shifting idea of truth, memory, and freedom. Shazna has a background in visual journalism and has worked at The Wall Street Journal, The Knight Foundation, The Associated Press, and Condé Nast. She was awarded a degree in linguistics, literature, and history from the Sorbonne, Paris. Fellowships include a MacDowell residency in 2024, a John S. Knight fellowship at Stanford University in 2014, and a Sulzberger fellowship at Columbia University in 2008. She is currently an entrepreneur in residence at the Brown Institute at Columbia University.

An award-winning journalist, researcher and community organiser, Shirish’s work focuses on developing new ways to build more effective, engaging and inclusive journalism. Across a 25 year career, he’s worked in all the UK’s major broadcast newsrooms and at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Now, as News Innovation Research Fellow of the Media Cymru R&D consortium in Wales, he’s leading the “News for All” project – a collaboration with BBC News aimed at understanding and serving the information needs of people and communities who don’t currently see or get a value from journalism.In parallel, he’s also working on the People’s Newsroom, a project centred around the belief that collective story sharing can be at the heart of the transformational changes our societies need.

Tamana Ayazi is an Emmy-winning director and producer, National Geographic Explorer, and human rights advocate born and raised in Balkh, Afghanistan. In 2021, she began assisting Amnesty International in documenting its year-long report titled 'Death in Slow Motion: Women and Girls Under Taliban Rule'. Tamana Ayazi's film credits include the Academy Award-winning short documentary "Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You're a Girl)" (2019), Where the Light Shines (2019) and One Bullet (2023). Her debut feature-length documentary, "In Her Hands," premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival and won the Audience Award at the 2022 Camden International Film Festival. Tamana is the recipient of the Cinema for Peace Dove Award for Women's Empowerment, along with three News and Emmy nominations in 2023, along with one win. Her work is now available on Netflix.

Tessa Pang is an Impact Producer at Lighthouse Reports. She works to ensure Lighthouse’s findings are strategically placed to create tangible change on the issues they investigate. She predominantly focuses on issues of power imbalance within the world's food systems, but also works across the migration and borders newsrooms. Before joining Lighthouse, she was a digital campaigner fighting for progressive change on issues such as refugee rights, climate change and fast-fashion factory safety.

Volodymyr Yermolenko, Ph.D., is a Ukrainian philosopher, journalist, and book writer. He works as an analytics director at Internews Ukraine, chief editor at UkraineWorld.org (a multimedia project in English focused on Ukraine), and as an associate professor at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Volodymyr is also the editor of the essay collection “Ukraine in Histories and Stories.” Volodymyr received the Sheveliov Prize for best Ukrainian essays book in 2018, the Petro Mohyla Prize in 2021, and the Book of the Year prize in several nominations in 2018 and 2015.