Board of Governors

Scott Kraft is editor at large for enterprise journalism and special projects for the Los Angeles Times, and previously served as managing editor for the paper. He is a former foreign correspondent who spent a decade abroad for the Times – in Johannesburg, Nairobi and Paris. He covered Nelson Mandela’s release, among other major stories. Returning to LA, Kraft was deputy foreign editor and then national editor for a decade, leading a team that won four Pulitzer Prizes. He has also served as a Pulitzer juror in International Reporting and chaired the Public Service award jury.

Azmat Khan is an investigative reporter with The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine, and a professor at Columbia Journalism School, where she also leads the Li Center for Global Journalism. She has served five terms on the OPC board. She is an award-winning investigative journalist who’s spent the last decade reporting from places like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria and Iraq, both as a staff reporter and a freelancer. Khan won the OPC’s 2017 Ed Cunningham Award for “The Uncounted,” a story in the NYT Magazine about civilians killed by drones in Iraq.

Josh Fine is a senior segment producer for HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.” He served three terms on the OPC board, the last one as Secretary. In recent years he has been an OPC awards judge, a judge of microgrant applications, and a panelist for OPC programs. He the reporting team for Real Sports’ “The Lords of the Rings,” which won the OPC’s inaugural Peter Jennings Award. This was his second OPC award. His international sports investigations have also won an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, an Emmy, and were part of Real Sports’ Peabody Award for television excellence and meritorious public service. Before HBO, he was an associate producer for CBS News’ “60 Minutes” and an off-air reporter for the ABC News Investigative Unit.

John Avlon is senior political analyst and anchor at CNN. From 2013 to 2018, he was the editor-in-chief and managing director of The Daily Beast. At the OPC, he served as the emcee presenting the awards to winners at the 2021 and 2022 awards dinners and served as a Governor the past two years.

Sandra Stevenson is deputy director of photography at The Washington Post overseeing international, climate and health. She was previously associate director of photography at CNN, where she managed a team of picture editors who curate the home screen, edit stories and newsletters, as well as special projects. Prior to joining CNN, Stevenson was at The New York Times, where she oversaw digital visual editors on the news desk and worked on visual content for Race/Related and Gender, in addition to exclusive projects such as “Overlooked” and “This Is 18.” As a Governor of the OPC, she managed the Photoville project in 2021 honoring Christopher Dickey, a legendary foreign correspondent and editor who was an OPC Vice President. Stevenson also served on the micro-grant judging committee and election nominating committee. In the past, Stevenson was program coordinator for the Black Filmmaker Foundation, where she had a deep commitment to helping people of color enter the film industry, and spent 8 years at AP, moving up from photo assistant to overseeing photo news coverage for Latin America and the Caribbean.

Jodi Schneider is political news director for Bloomberg TV and Radio, in charge of political coverage globally for the network. She has been in that role for the past year. Schneider has been at Bloomberg for 12 years – five years in D.C. running coverage of the U.S. Congress, then more than five years overseas in Tokyo and Hong Kong in senior editing roles; she returned to the US in January 2021. While in Hong Kong Schneider was on the board of and then president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong.

Fahim Abed is a co-editor with Lighthouse Reports and 2023 Nieman fellow at Harvard. He was a reporter for The New York Times in Afghanistan until the Taliban takeover of the country in August 2021. He was evacuated from Kabul with a number of his colleagues and relocated to the United States. Abed was part of the New York Times team that won an Overseas Press Club Award for coverage of Afghanistan. Prior to joining the Times in 2016, he worked as a producer and reporter with Turkey’s Anadolu Agency, the BBC World Service and various local outlets in Afghanistan. He is a 2019 alumni of the East West Center’s fellowship program and an Afghanistan Observatory Scholar with New America. In the spring of 2022, he joined the Tribune-Review in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as a visual journalist through the World Association of News Publishers’ Afghan Journalist Appeal program.

Amran Abocar is the Canada bureau chief and global mining editor at Reuters. Prior to her current role, she worked in Asia as deputy commodities editor and in the Middle East, as Gulf deputy bureau chief, covering everything from Dubai’s debt implosion and the Arab Spring to nationalist mining policies in Indonesia. Over the past two years, Abocar has been an international committee member at Canadian Journalists For Free Expression (CJFE) which monitors and defends free expression and access to information in Canada and overseas.

Singeli Agnew is an independent cinematographer, producer and director of documentary films and current affairs series on a range of platforms – from HBO to Al Jazeera, Netflix to National Geographic. Her coverage has been honored with the highest awards in the industry, including the OPC’s Edward R. Murrow Award in 2019. Agnew helped launch The New York Times’ first original TV series, The Weekly, in 2018. Before that she was the Middle East-based cinematographer and producer for the HBO nightly news series Vice News Tonight – covering the fall of Mosul, the war in Afghanistan, and other conflicts across the region – and a principal cinematographer and producer for Al Jazeera’s flagship documentary show, Fault Lines, including the Peabody-winning “Haiti in a Time of Cholera.”

Deborah Amos is a longtime reporter for National Public Radio who has been an international correspondent for three decades, covering the Middle East for NPR, PBS and ABC-TV. She served as a Vice President of the Overseas Press Club from 2016 to 2020. She covers wars; invasions and the resulting humanitarian fall out. Amos’ awards include the DuPont-Columbia, a Peabody, and a George Polk. She is also an educator, teaching journalism at Princeton, Columbia and SUNY New Paltz. Amos served as emcee for the OPC’s Annual Awards Dinner in 2015.

Juan Arredondo is a Colombian-American photographer whose images explore social inequality, human rights and conflict. Most recently he was covering the war in Ukraine with his colleague Brent Renaud when he was wounded in an attack at a checkpoint near Kyiv which also resulted in the tragic loss of Renaud. Arredondo is a regular contributor for The New York Times and National Geographic. His photographs have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, ESPN, Vanity Fair, LeMonde Magazine, Der Spiegel, among others. He’s a graduate of the Columbia University School of Journalism, where he is also an adjunct professor.

Nadja Drost is a journalist and documentary filmmaker who lives in New York after a decade based in Bogotá, Colombia. Her article about Cameroonian and Pakistani asylum-seekers traversing the Darien Gap, which ran as the April 2020 cover story of the California Sunday Magazine, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. Drost works in longform print, radio, and television, and regularly reports from Latin America as a Special Correspondent for the PBS NewsHour. She also makes documentary films — she independently produced the award-winning Between Midnight and the Rooster’s Crow (2005), and is currently in the sixth year of production on a documentary film with Federico, The End of Our War, about a FARC guerrilla fighter and mother who lays down arms in Colombia’s peace deal.

Albert Goldson is a freelance journalist based in New York and founder of the Cerulean Council that specializes in analyzing geopolitics, global trade and urban security issues. He often serves as an expert guest on podcasts and cable TV programs.

Anup Kaphle is the executive editor at Rest of World, a global newsroom that tells stories at the intersection of technology and culture in the non-Western world. Before returning to the U.S. in 2020, Anup worked in Nepal, his home country, where, as the editor-in-chief of The Kathmandu Post, he managed the country’s largest English-language newsroom as well as the publication’s digital platforms. Prior to that, Anup led efforts at the James Beard Award-winning Roads & Kingdoms, managed international reporting teams as BuzzFeed News’ deputy foreign editor, and oversaw digital efforts for the foreign desk at The Washington Post.

Beth Knobel is an associate professor at Fordham University in New York City, teaching multi-platform journalism. Before joining the Fordham faculty, she spent 14 years working as a journalist based in Russia—most of it as Moscow Bureau Chief for CBS News, where she received Emmy, Murrow, and Sigma Delta Chi Awards for her work. Knobel still freelances for CBS News and assists with its Russia coverage. She has also reported for the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and APTN, amongst others. Knobel serves as a trustee of the Columbia Daily Spectator and faculty advisor to Fordham’s student newspaper, The Ram.

Rod Nordland is an author and longtime foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He has been an OPC member since the late 1970s, early in his career as a foreign correspondent, during which he covered mostly wars and crises, first with the Philadelphia Inquirer in Asia, then with Newsweek, where he was chief foreign correspondent, and finally with The New York Times. At the Times, Nordland worked as a journalist in 150 countries over 40 years, the last eight years in Afghanistan as the Kabul Bureau Chief, and international correspondent at large. He stepped down to to take medical leave and then long-term disability, but has recovered and recently written a 75,000 word book for Harper Collins, Waiting for the Monsoon, a memoir of war and glioblastoma, to be published in 2023.

Alexis Okeowo (uses they/them pronouns) has reported on conflict, human rights, and culture across Africa, as well as from Mexico, Europe, and the American South for The New Yorker and other publications. Okeowo is the author of A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa, which received the 2018 PEN Open Book Award. Their work has also been anthologized in “The Best American Sports Writing” and “The Best American Travel Writing.” Okeowo was named journalist of the year by the Newswomen’s Club of New York in 2020, and received the Philip D. Reed Environmental Writing Award in 2022.

Mary Rajkumar is the international investigations editor for The Associated Press. She led the team that won the 2016 Pulitzer Gold Medal for the “Seafood from Slaves” investigation, which ended up freeing some 2,000 people from forced labor. Rajkumar has also edited three Pulitzer finalist packages – investigative on China in 2021, international on Al-Qaida in 2014 and another international on child trafficking in Africa in 2009. Stories she edited have won eight OPC awards. Rajkumar grew up in Singapore and is Indian by nationality.

Peter Spiegel has been the US managing editor of the Financial Times since 2019, returning to the US after nearly a decade as foreign correspondent and editor in Europe. Prior to that, he spent eight years covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, reporting frequently from both war zones. In his two years on the OPC board, Spiegel has served as chair of the Press Freedom Committee, working with the board’s leadership to ensure the OPC’s voice is heard on issues like the Chinese crackdown on Hong Kong-based news organizations and the targeting of independent journalists in Belarus.

Liam Stack is religion correspondent for the Metro desk of The New York Times. Before that, he was a politics reporter, a foreign correspondent and general assignment reporter covering national and international issues for the Times. Stack began his career at The Daily News Egypt, an Egyptian English-language newspaper, in 2005 and later became a a Middle East correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, based in Cairo. In 2011 he was hired by the Times to cover the Egyptian Revolution and the Arab Spring, and he has been based in New York since 2013. Stack has been on the OPC board since 2014, and was elected Secretary in 2016 and Treasurer in 2018.

Ginger Thompson is the chief of correspondents and a deputy managing editor at ProPublica. She has spent much of her career reporting from Latin America. Previously, Thompson reported for The New York Times and The Baltimore Sun. She has won numerous awards, including the Chancellor Award, a Maria Moors Cabot Medal, and Polk and Peabody awards. Thompson was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team at the Times for a series of stories about race in America and have twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, including for a ProPublica series of stories that forced the Trump administration to end its policy of separating undocumented immigrant children from their parents at the southern border. She is a member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Nilo Tabrizy is a video reporter for The Washington Post’s Visual Forensics team. Before joining The Post, she worked as a video journalist at the New York Times, where she covered Iran, race and policing, and abortion access. Tabrizy is also writing a book about the women-led uprising in Iran sparked by the death of Mahsa Jina Amini for Pantheon (US) and Atlantic Books (UK). She holds a Master’s of Science from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and a B.A. in Political Science and French from the University of British Columbia. Tabrizy speaks Persian and French fluently.

Vivienne Walt is a Paris-based journalist for TIME magazine and FORTUNE, traveling widely across Europe, the Middle East, and further afield. She has reported from more than 30 countries, including from Ukraine and Nigeria, specializing in conflict and its consequences. Her work has also been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, LA Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, Wall Street Journal and National Geographic Magazine. She is a regular guest on PRI’s “The World” and France 24’s “The World This Week.” Walt was raised in Cape Town, South Africa, then emigrated to New York, where she worked for Newsday. She has been an OPC juror since 2012, and headed the Ed Cunningham judges’ panel in 2015. Walt is also a juror for the Prix Bayeux for War Reporting.

Daniella Zalcman is a Vietnamese-American documentary photographer and photojournalist based in New Orleans, and is also the founder and executive director of Women Photograph, a nonprofit working to elevate the voices of women and nonbinary visual journalists worldwide. Her work focuses on the modern legacies of western colonization, from the rise of homophobia in East Africa to the coercive assimilation of Indigenous youth in North America.

Brian Byrd is a Program Officer at the Foundation for Opioid Response Efforts (FORE). Byrd brings nearly two decades of experience in health care and grantmaking. Before joining FORE, he managed the New York State Health Foundation’s Special Projects Fund, a $3 million grantmaking program that supports innovative projects addressing public health and community health needs. Before that, Byrd served as director for community partnerships for CARE, an international humanitarian organization, where he was responsible for building strategic partnerships with policymakers as well as business and nonprofit leaders.

Emma Daly is head of the Collaboratory at Human Rights Watch, an initiative to foster more effective external collaboration and impact. She began as a general assignment reporter at a local newspaper in Costa Rica in the late 1980s – which meant she graduated to covering the conflicts in the rest of Central America, including the Contras, the US invasion of Panama and the peace process. Daly joined what was then known as the Foreign Desk at the Independent, and covered the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, before moving to Spain. Her last job in journalism was covering Spain and Portugal for The New York Times, and after a couple of years freelancing in New York, she joined Human Rights Watch.

Laurie Hays is managing partner and founder for Laurie Hays & Assoc. and advises on strategic, financial and corporate governance communications. Previously, she served as managing director and co-head of special situations at Edelman. She spent almost 35 years in journalism, starting out in New Orleans for a little afternoon newspaper called the States-Item, covering politics and crime in two southern-most parishes. In 1986 Hays joined The Wall Street Journal soon headed to Moscow with her husband, Fen Montaigne, who was the Moscow bureau chief for the Philadelphia Inquirer. They were there almost four years covering the final years of Gorbachev which ended with a break-up of the Soviet Union. Hays covered 9/11 and the 2008 financial meltdown at Bloomberg while overseeing global financial coverage of all the beat areas.

Marjorie Miller is administrator of The Pulitzer Prizes. Previously, she was vice president and global enterprise editor for The Associated Press. Miller ran the AP’s Latin America and Caribbean coverage from Mexico City. She also have worked at the Los Angeles Times as foreign editor, a foreign affairs editorial writer and bureau chief in El Salvador, Mexico, Germany, Israel and the United Kingdom. Miller is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and on the boards of the Craig Newmark-CUNY Graduate School of Journalism Foundation and Maria Moors Cabot Prizes.

John Simons is a partner at the Brunswick Group, a global advisory firm focused on strategic issues and key stakeholders. Prior to joining Brunswick in April, Simons served in senior editorial roles at top-tier news organizations for more than 30 years, most recently as Executive Editor at TIME. There, he was responsible for the publication’s technology coverage, as well as broader national and business news. Before that, Simons spent several years at the Wall Street Journal as Deputy Health and Science Editor, Bureau Chief for the Health Business and Energy Editor for Europe, Middle East and Africa. Earlier in his career, Simons served as a reporter, covering the drug and biotech industries, immigration, technology and economic policy at the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and U.S. News & World Report.