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.

Sandra Stevenson is managing editor for Education Week, overseeing visuals and immersive experiences. Previously, she was deputy director of photography at The Washington Post overseeing international, climate and health. Before that, she was at CNN where she led picture editors who curate the home screen, edit stories and newsletters, as well as special projects. Prior to CNN, she 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, Stevenson has served as treasurer and chair of the programming committee. she was a judge for the Continuing Coverage of Conflict Award in 2024. In 2021, she curated a Photoville project 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.

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, a Peabody, and a George Polk. Amos served as emcee for the OPC’s Annual Awards Dinner in 2015.

Peter Spiegel is managing editor for The Washington Post, overseeing national and local newsroom departments. 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, working with the board’s leadership to ensure the OPC’s voice is heard on issues like the detention of journalists in Russia, denial of their visas in China, and harassment even in allied democracies like India and Turkey.

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. 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 Craig Newmark-CUNY Graduate School of Journalism Foundation and Maria Moors Cabot Prizes.

Jodi Schneider is a political journalist who previously served as political news director for Bloomberg TV and Radio. She was at Bloomberg for 14 years – the first five in Washington, DC in charge of congressional coverage; then overseas in Tokyo and Hong Kong in senior editing roles, returning to the US in January 2021. Schneider is now based in DC. In Hong Kong she was on the board and then president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong, championing press freedom even amid the 2019 protests and then the imposition of the National Security Law. In her years on the OPC board, she has sought to involve OPC in global press freedom efforts and helped judge in the OPC awards competition.

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 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.

Yinka Adegoke is the founding editor of Semafor Africa, a unit of Semafor, a global publication launched in October 2022. He has reported from more than 20 countries in Africa and Europe as well as the United States mostly covering business. At Semafor he manages a network of around two dozen journalists reporting from over 40 countries in sub-Saharan Africa covering everything from geopolitics, macroeconomics, and business to technology, culture and education. He and his team focus on stories that highlight the impact of Africa and Africans in the world beyond the continent.

Singeli Agnew has worked as cinematographer, producer, writer and director on documentary films and current affairs series on a range of platforms – from HBO to Al Jazeera, Netflix to National Geographic. She helped launch The New York Times’ first original TV series, The Weekly, in 2018. Before that Agnew 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.”

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.

Josh Fine is an award-winning investigative reporter and producer, most recently at HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.” He is Alicia Patterson Fellow and Institute for Democracy, Journalism, and Citizenship Fellow at Syracuse University. Fine’s report on Qatar’s abusive practices for achieving prominence in world sport was the first-ever sports segment to win an Overseas Press Club Award. He later won a 2nd OPC award for “The Lords of the Rings,” a 77-minute report on the International Olympic Committee. He previously served as secretary and vice president of the OPC and has been actively engaged in planning the OPC’s annual dinner, judging awards, and planning programs. 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.

Stephen Kalin is a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, based in the Middle East. He has reported on conflict, politics and business for more than a decade, with postings in Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Kalin also began reporting from Ukraine after the Russian invasion. He started my career with an OPC Foundation fellowship, joining Reuters in 2013. Kalin went on to cover the U.S.-backed military campaign against ISIS and then the rise of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Anup Kaphle is Editor in Chief of 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.

Azmat Khan is an investigative reporter with 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, working across the board to expand the support the club offers to freelancers, local journalists and early career reporters, while also working to adapt key club activities to our changing industry. For more than a decade and a half, Khan has reported from countries such as Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan, both as a staff reporter and a freelancer. 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.

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.

Marc Lacey is the managing editor of The New York Times. He has been based in Kenya and Mexico as a foreign correspondent, with stints in Albania, Sudan, Iraq and Haiti.

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 global investigations editor for The Associated Press. Most recently, she led the team that won the 2023 Pulitzer Gold Medal for coverage of Mariupol, where the courage of reporters on the ground saved thousands of lives. Rajkumar also led the team that won the 2016 Pulitzer Gold Medal for “Seafood from Slaves,” which ended up freeing some 2,000 people from forced labor. She grew up in Singapore and is Indian by nationality.

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.

Ginger Thompson is the chief of correspondents and a 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.

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.

Stephen J. Adler is board chair of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and founding director of the Ethics and Journalism Initiative at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Most recently, he was editor-in-chief of Reuters, from 2011-2021, and editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek, from 2005 until 2009. Adler has, at various times, judged the Pulitzer, Loeb, and OPC awards.

John Avlon is a long-time journalist with stints as editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast and most recently CNN anchor and political analyst. At the OPC, he has served as governor and as emcee presenting the awards to winners at the 2021 and 2022 awards dinners.

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.

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.

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.