Meet the panel of judges

Mr. Obinna Anyadike

Mr. Anyadike is an online journalist and editor based in Nairobi, with extensive experience covering international development issues, Africa and the Global South. He is currently Editor-at-Large of IRIN, (formerly Integrated Regional Information Networks), a news agency focusing on humanitarian stories in regions that are often forgotten, under-reported, misunderstood or ignored.. When IRIN was under the UN, he was editor-in-chief for seven years. Previously, he had been working as IRIN’s Managing Editor for southern Africa, where he launched a ground-breaking HIV/AIDS service, PlusNews. Mr. Anyadike began his career as a back-packing journalist writing for the Economist and other London-based African publications. He was the Zambia correspondent for Inter Press Service, chronicling the start of the multiparty wave in Anglophone Africa, and went on to cover the upheavals in Somalia and Ethiopia. He later worked as Africa’s Editor for IPS based in Zimbabwe, working with a team of young pioneers carving out space for progressive, independent media on the continent. A regular commentator on Boko Haram, Obi holds an MA in Peace and Conflict studies from the University of Notre Dame.

Ms. Rula Amin

Ms. Amin is a veteran journalist who has been covering the Middle East for international news networks since 1989. She was born in Jerusalem and worked with CNN Jerusalem bureau for years covering the first Intifada, the first Gulf war, Madrid Peace conference as well as different rounds of showdowns and peace negotiations all over the region between Israel, the Palestinians and Arab countries.

Ms. Amin has a MA degree in journalism from Columbia University. In 1998, she re-joined CNN, covering the 2nd Intifada, Iraq under the UN sanctions and the different military showdowns with US led coalition. As a CNN correspondent in the region she also covered Egypt, Lebanon and Syria. Ms. Amin had also hosted the CNN "Inside the Middle East" program before joining Al-Jazeera International in 2006 as their Beirut based correspondent. In that capacity, she covered Lebanon and the region especially the demonstrations that swept Syria in 2011 and the conflict that evolved there. She also covered extensively the impact of the Syrian crisis on Lebanon especially the influx of Syrian refugees to Lebanon

Jim Mulvaney

Jim Mulvaney is a veteran journalist who has reported from more than 60 countries on five continents and led a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. Mulvaney has worked as a reporter, investigative team leader, national correspondent, foreign correspondent and high-level editor during more than 20 years in journalism. He has written extensively on organized crime, including the corrupting influence on both government and trade unions. He has written about worker safety in Latin America and Asia. His 10-part Newsday series on Bangladesh, written in 1989, remains one of the most significant pieces from that troubled nation. His most recent journalism has been in the Washington Post on police use of excessive force.

He was a founding member of the Pulitzer Prize winning news organization International Consortium of International Journalists. Besides the Pulitzer prize – for an expose on unprecedented medical, moral and criminal actions at a famed University of California hospital and fertility clinic – he has won numerous journalism awards including from the Society of Silurian’s, Scripps Howard, the Associated Press and the society of Investigative Reporters and Editors. He began his journalism career as a consumer affairs investigator for a local television station. He went on to work at Newsday, covering crime, the United Nations and serving as a foreign correspondent in Belfast (Northern Ireland) and bureau chief in Latin America and Asia. He developed an investigative team at the Orange County (CA) Register, winning the Pulitzer Prize. He later worked as Deputy Managing Editor of the New York Daily News, then New York City’s largest daily newspaper. He works as an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York.

Adriana Zehbrauskas

Ms. Zehbrauskas is a Brazilian documentary photographer based in Mexico City. Her work is largely focused on the issues related to the Mexican drug war, migration and religion. She works mainly in Mexico, Central and South America and contributes regularly to The New York Times, UNICEF, BuzzFeed News, Bloomberg and The Washington Post. Her work has also been featured in Leica Fotografie International, National Geographic Brasil, Vice, Du, Newsweek, Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and Le Monde, among others. She is one of the three photographers profiled in the documentary “Beyond
Assignment” (USA, 2011). The film was produced by The Knight Center for International Media and the University of Miami and features her “Tepito; Barrio Bravo” project. It was also published, as an e-book, by Cristal de Luz, a Mexican digital publishing house focusing on Mexican contemporary photography.

Ms. Zehbrauskas is one of the recipients of the Getty Images Instagram Grant in 2015 for her mobile photography work documenting under represented communities. Her mobile photography work was also selected by Time Magazine for the “29 Instagrams That Defined the World in 2014”; she was the recipient of the Troféu Mulher Imprensa (photojournalist newspaper/magazine) 2012; her project on Faith in Brazil and Mexico was awarded an Art & Worship World Prize by the Niavaran Artistic Creation Foundation. Adriana is an instructor with the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop since 2008 and was one of the masters on the first World Press Photo Latin America Master Class (Mexico, 2015).

Maria-teresa Ronderos

Maria Teresa Ronderos directs the Open Society Foundations Independent Journalism Program and is a member of the directors and editorial boards of the Garcia Marquez Iberoamerican Foundation for New Journalism. She has had a rich career as investigative reporter, editor, trainer and free press advocate in her home country Colombia and in Latin America. More recently she was founder and director for six years of VerdadAbierta.com, an online niche media covering war, transitional justice and peace in Colombia. Based on this work she published Guerras Recicladas, which reconstructs the history of Para-militarism in her country to explain why the failures in bringing peace to the country. This work earned her the Simon Bolivar Journalist of the Year Award. Ronderos is also author of the books Cinco en Humor (Aguilar, 2007), and Retratos del Poder (Planeta, 1997).