Board of Governors

Sandra Stevenson is managing editor at Education Week, where she oversees visuals and immersive experiences. Previously, she was deputy director of photography at The Washington Post, leading international, climate, and health coverage. Before that, she managed picture editors at CNN, overseeing the home screen, stories, newsletters, and special projects. At The New York Times, she led digital visual editors on the news desk and contributed to Race/Related, Gender, and projects including Overlooked and This Is 18. Earlier in her career, she spent eight years at The Associated Press, advancing from photo assistant to overseeing news photo coverage for Latin America and the Caribbean, and served as program coordinator for the Black Filmmaker Foundation. An active leader in the Overseas Press Club, Stevenson has served as governor, a vice president, treasurer, and programming chair, as well as a judge for the Continuing Coverage of Conflict Award. She curated a 2021 Photoville tribute to Christopher Dickey and served on the micro-grant and nominating committees.

Amran Abocar is the Global General Manager at Reuters. Prior to her current role, she was Canada bureau chief and global mining editor. Previously, she held a variety of newsroom roles across the organization in Canada, Asia and the Middle East, covering everything from Dubai’s debt implosion and the Arab Spring to nationalist mining policies in Indonesia. Abocar is also on the board of the Canadian Journalists For Free Expression (CJFE) which monitors and defends free expression and access to information in Canada and overseas.

Marc Lacey is the managing editor of The New York Times. Over a long career in journalism, he has traveled to over 50 countries as a foreign correspondent in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. He was one of the first journalists on the ground in Darfur during the conflict there and in Haiti after the devastating earthquake. Previously, he covered the White House, Congress and the US-Mexico border.

Peter Spiegel is managing editor of The Washington Post, overseeing departments covering US politics and government, international affairs and national security, and business and technology. He was previously US managing editor of the Financial Times, having moved into editorial management after almost two decades as a foreign correspondent, first covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and then based in Brussels, covering the eurozone debt crisis. Spiegel has previously served as chair of the Press Freedom Committee and, as a vice president, worked with leadership in the search for a new OPC executive director and shoring up the club’s finances.

Deborah Amos has covered the Middle East for three decades, reporting for NPR, PBS, and ABC-TV. She now works on a project on accountability in the international criminal justice system for Princeton University – where she also teaches journalism. Amos’ course, “reporting migration” comes from war zone reporting on refugees. In the spring of 2024, she was a visiting professor at Bard Berlin where many in the class were refugees on scholarship. Amos served as a Vice President of the Overseas Press Club from 2016 to 2020. Her awards include the DuPont-Columbia Award, a Peabody Award, and a George Polk Award. Amos served as emcee for the OPC’s Annual Awards Dinner in 2015.

Stephen Kalin is a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, based in the Middle East. He has reported extensively on conflict, regional politics, and international business. His journalism career began in 2013 after receiving a fellowship from the Overseas Press Club (OPC) Foundation, which launched him into several positions at Reuters News Agency. Throughout postings in Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, Kalin has documented monumental geopolitical shifts. His prominent coverage includes frontline reporting on the U.S.-backed military campaign against ISIS in Iraq and charting the societal and economic reforms in Saudi Arabia amid the rise of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He expanded his reporting footprint to Ukraine following the Russian invasion where he covered drone warfare and evolving military technology.

John Avlon is an award-winning journalist, author and historian. He is the chairman of Citizens Union of New York, the state’s oldest good government group and the author of Lincoln and the Fight for Peace; Washington’s Farewell: The Founding Father’s Warning to Future Generations; Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America; and Independent Nation – as well as the upcoming Theodore Roosevelt’s Guide to Life. He worked as a Senior Political Analyst and Anchor at CNN as well as the Editor-in-Chief and Managing Director of The Daily Beast, when the newsroom won 17 awards for journalistic excellence. In 2024, he was the Democratic congressional nominee in New York’s 1^st Congressional District. Avlon served as Chief Speechwriter and Deputy Communications Director for Mayor Rudy Giuliani during his second term. He and his team were responsible for writing the eulogies of the firefighters and police officers murdered in the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Susan Chira is the co-founder, with Amanda Bennett, of the Main Street Media Cooperative, matching experienced journalists with local newsrooms on a per-story basis. She is the former editor-in-chief of The Marshall Project, a nonprofit newsroom focusing on criminal justice, where work she supervised won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and several other awards. Chira was a New York Times reporter, editor and executive for nearly 40 years, including serving as deputy executive editor; foreign editor (the first and only woman so far to hold that position); and foreign correspondent. She directed work that won multiple journalism awards, including several Pulitzer Prizes.  She returned to reporting after 20 years as an editor to report on gender issues, including the role of women in politics in the first Trump term and the 2018 midterms.  She was part of a team that shared the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for reporting on sexual harassment.

James Fontanella-Khan is the US Finance Editor of the Financia Times, overseeing coverage of some of the world’s most important financial institutions, as well as the deals and private capital team across America. He also works closely with the FT’s Washington team to cover the intersection of politics and money. Previously, he worked as a correspondent in Brussels, Delhi and Mumbai. He began his career at the FT in 2005 on the world news desk in London. His journalism has been recognized with multiple awards. In 2024, he was part of the FT team that won the Gerald Loeb Award for its coverage of Credit Suisse’s collapse.

Julia Ioffe is a founding partner of Puck, where she’s the Washington correspondent and co-authors the newsletter The Best & The Brightest and covers foreign policy and national security. She was born in Moscow and immigrated with her family to the U.S. at the age of seven in 1990. She has a degree in Soviet history from Princeton. She’s a leading analyst on Russia and is regularly interviewed by TV outlets. One of her many memorable pieces was a 2011 New Yorker profile of Alexei Navalny, the first story that brought him to the attention of the U.S. audience. She’s also written for Foreign Policy, The New Republic, Politico, and The Atlantic. Last year, she published Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award and won a Jewish National Book Award.

Azmat Khan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter whose work grapples with the human costs of war. She is the Patty Cadby Birch Assistant Professor at Columbia Journalism School, where she also leads the Simon and June Li Center for Global Journalism, and is an investigative reporter at the New York Times Magazine. She has served six terms on the OPC board, working to expand the support the OPC offers to freelancers, local journalists and early career reporters, while also adapting activities to our changing industry. For almost two decades, Khan has reported from places such as Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, the West Bank and Pakistan. Khan has won two OPC Awards: the Roy Rowan Award in 2022 for “The Civilian Casualty Files,” and the Ed Cunningham Award in 2018 for “The Uncounted.”

Catherine Kim is executive vice president of editorial for NBC News. She has had a long career in broadcast journalism working in primetime, morning television, on a daily evening newscast as a producer and later Senior Producer at CBS News, CNN, and NBC News. Kim spent nearly a decade in digital media, establishing the digital newsroom for NBC News, taking the team from several dozen reporters and editors in 2015 to a prizewinning team many times that size. At NBC News, she currently oversees editorial across digital, the news organization’s multi-platform editorial units, working closely with domestic and internal bureaus, correspondents, and producers across the organization and the NBCU News Group.

Kate Linthicum is a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times based in Mexico City. Since joining The Times in 2008 she has covered immigration, local and national politics, and has reported from across Latin America as well as from Asia, Africa and the Middle East. She is a recipient of the Maria Moors Cabot Prize, awarded by Columbia University for outstanding reporting in the Americas, and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Foreign Correspondence. She has won two Overseas Press Club awards, is a two-time Livingston Awards finalist and was part of a team of journalists that won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news. She was raised in New Mexico and graduated from Barnard College.

Marjorie Miller is administrator of The Pulitzer Prizes. Previously, she was Vice President and Global Enterprise Editor for The Associated Press. At the Los Angeles Times, she was bureau chief in El Salvador, Mexico City, Jerusalem and London before moving to Los Angeles as Foreign Editor; she then moved to the editorial pages to write international editorials. Subsequently, at The Associated Press, Miller was the Regional Editor for Latin America and the Caribbean based in Mexico City before moving to New York to manage Global Enterprise and Investigations. Miller is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and on the boards of the Pulitzer Prizes and Maria Moors Cabot Prizes.

Jeannie Ohm is a global investigations editor at The Associated Press. She oversees the development and production of innovative and in-depth investigative projects. She co-led the team that won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting on U.S. surveillance being used and abused around the world. She also guided the visual storytelling for the Mariupol coverage that won the 2023 Pulitzer Gold Medal. Ohm’s other award-winning work includes investigations about police deaths involving non-lethal restraints; fraud and abuse in South Korea’s overseas adoptions; potential war crimes in Ukraine; and how deeply the nation’s food supply is connected to U.S. prison labor. She has helped AP reach new audiences through collaborations with FRONTLINE PBS, podcasts and other documentaries. Prior to joining AP, Jeannie was an on-air correspondent for MSNBC and NBC News and covered the White House and Pentagon.

Josh Fine is an investigative reporter and producer whose work has appeared on HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, CBS News’ 60 Minutes, and ABC’s World News Tonight. His reporting has examined the International Olympic Committee, Qatar’s rise in global sport, the NCAA’s treatment of student-athletes, the NFL’s disability system, and how Vladimir Putin uses sports to further his repressive regime. He’s been recognized with two Overseas Press Club Awards, two Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) awards, two Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards and 19 Emmys. He’s taught investigative sports journalism at Yale and Penn State and is currently a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.

Steven L. Herman is a veteran news correspondent, whose positions included White House bureau chief and chief national correspondent of the Voice of America. He is the executive director of the Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation and an assistant professor of practice in the School of Journalism & New Media at the University of Mississippi. Steve spent more than a quarter of a century in Asia, including years of reporting from Tokyo and subsequently as a VOA correspondent and bureau chief in India, South Korea and Thailand.  Steve is the author of the non-fiction book, “Behind the White House Curtain,” published by Kent State University Press and co-host of the nationally syndicated weekend radio show, America@250: Due Diligence. He has covered the past three U.S. presidential elections and divides his time between Washington, DC and Oxford, Miss.

Minky Worden is the Director of Global Initiatives at Human Rights Watch, where she previously was Media Director. Worden has served on the OPC board twice before, is an OPC Foundation board member, and has been a devoted annual OPC Awards judge since 2000. Worden is a columnist for Forbes, teaches at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Before joining Human Rights Watch in 1998, she lived and worked in Hong Kong as an adviser to Democratic Party chairman Martin Lee and worked at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. as a speechwriter for the U.S. Attorney General. Worden speaks Cantonese and German.

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.

Brian Byrd is a contributing writer for Hot Mirror, an online publication on photography and visual storytelling. Byrd brings nearly two decades of experience in philanthropy. He previously managed independent grant programs supporting public health and global visual storytelling.

Tom Goldstone has been the executive producer of CNN’s flagship world-affairs program “Fareed Zakaria GPS” for 15 years.  His career started 30 years ago at ABC News where he worked with the likes of Peter Jennings, Barbara Walters and Connie Chung.  He has produced interviews with Presidents Bush (both), Clinton, Obama, Macron, Zelensky, Putin, Pezeshkian, and many others.  During three decades in broadcast journalism, Goldstone has earned multiple Emmys, a Peabody and numerous other awards.  A New York City native, Goldstone lives there with his wife, two teenage sons and one French bulldog.

Nikhil Kumar was named executive editor at TIME in January, 2025, returning to the publication after an eight-year hiatus during which time he reported from across Asia for CNN and was part of the founding team at the Washington D.C.-based news analysis startup Grid. Earlier, he was TIME’s deputy’s international editor in New York and bureau chief in South Asia. Kumar has reported on several key stories, including the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, the exodus of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, the war in Afghanistan and the 2019 Easter Sunday terror attacks in Sri Lanka, for which he received an Emmy nomination.

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.

Sebastian Rotella is an award-winning foreign correspondent, investigative reporter and author. His work has taken him to more than 30 countries. He worked for 23 years for the Los Angeles Times, serving as bureau chief in Paris and Buenos Aires, correspondent at the Mexican border and investigative correspondent based in Madrid. Since 2010, he has been a senior reporter at ProPublica covering international security issues. His honors include a Peabody award, Columbia University’s Moors Cabot Prize for career coverage of Latin America, Italy’s Urbino Press Award for career excellence in U.S. journalism, a German Marshall Fund prize for reporting on European affairs, and awards from the Overseas Press Club and the Inter-American Press Association. His reporting at the Mexican border inspired two songs on the Bruce Springsteen album The Ghost of Tom Joad.

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.

Nilo Tabrizy is an Iran Correspondent at Reuters, focusing on Visual Investigations. Previously she was a reporter on the Visual Forensics team at The Washington Post. 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 also wrote a book about the women-led uprising in Iran sparked by the death of Mahsa Jina Amini for Pantheon (US) and Atlantic Books (UK). It was longlisted for the National Book Award. 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 returning OPC governor, Walt is a roving freelance foreign correspondent for TIME and FORTUNE, based in Paris, and contributes to the New York Times DealBook. She has reported from more than 40 countries in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and occasionally Asia, with interviews from presidents to criminals, winning awards and citations from the National Press Club, Society of Business and Economic Writers, New York Press Club, and others. Walt has served as a juror for OPC awards for several years, and organized regular OPC panels at the American Library in Paris.

Marcus Yam is an international visual correspondent at The Globe and Mail. A Pulitzer Prize–winning photojournalist, his work focuses on conflict, displacement and the human consequences of war. Before joining The Globe and Mail, he spent more than a decade at the Los Angeles Times reporting across the United States and abroad. His work has documented the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the enduring impact of war on civilian life in some of the world’s most volatile regions. Yam received the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography for his coverage of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan while working for the Los Angeles Times. He is a two-time recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Journalism Award, including in 2019 for his portrayal of the everyday lives of Gazans. In 2023, he received the Overseas Press Club’s Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.He was also part of Pulitzer Prize–winning breaking news teams for coverage of the San Bernardino, California, terrorist attack in 2015 at the Los Angeles Times and the Oso, Washington, landslide in 2014 at The Seattle Times. Most recently, he was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, where he examined global conflict and the idea that journalism is an act of shared humanity.

Laura Zelenko is the global head of editorial standards at Bloomberg News and a senior executive editor responsible for all training and talent initiatives across the newsroom. Zelenko has developed programs to address potential bias and blind spots in coverage, and founded Bloomberg New Voices, a media training program for senior women in finance around the world that has helped more than triple the percentage of female expert guests featured on Bloomberg TV.  Zelenko began at Bloomberg in 1993, when she was hired in Prague and tasked with opening the company’s offices across the former East bloc, running coverage from Prague and Moscow for a decade. She was part of a team that won Bloomberg’s first OPC award for a series on international prime bank guarantee fraud. She later oversaw coverage across Latin America, started the newsroom’s first global emerging markets team and ultimately ran all beat reporting for Bloomberg News before taking on her current role in late 2017.