Aswini Anburajan is a reporter for Feet in 2 Worlds, an online and pubic radio reporting project that uses ethnic reporters to tell the stories of today’s immigrants. Aswini lead the election coverage for Feet in 2 Worlds during the 2008 general election where she helped start the project’s blog and scooped major news outlets on stories related to immigration and the Latino Vote. Aswini started her coverage of the historic 2008 election in 2007, when she went on the road with NBC News as a campaign reporter and spent a year traveling with and covering Barack Obama. She reported on air for MSNBC and NBC and wrote daily for the National Journal and the FirstRead poliical blog. Aswini entered NBC in 2005 through the News Associates program and has worked for Nightly News, the Today Show and the New York Bureau as an associate producer. This fall she will head to Cambridge University in the UK to pursue graduate studies.

The author of How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror and a frequent guest on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Reza Aslan is a columnist at the Daily Beast. In relation to his work as an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions, he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, and the Pacific Council on International Policy. His first book, the New York Times bestseller No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam has been translated into thirteen languages. Born in Iran, Aslan now lives in Los Angeles where he is assistant professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. He is a co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of BoomGen Studios, a hub for creative content from and about the Middle East, as well as editorial executive of Mecca.com.

Melissa Bell graduated from Georgetown with plans to attend law school, but she balked the day of orientation. In a desperate attempt to figure out “what to do” she landed up at Medill. In 2006, even more desperate and confused, Melissa found herself in India with an internship at the Hindustan Times. While there, an editor suggested she stay and help start Mint, a business paper in India. She meant to stay for six months. It’s now been three years and counting. Her highlights have included juggling court cases against her for religious slander, starting a podcast and blog for the paper, with the highly creative name “The Expat Show” and freelancing for such publications as The Guardian, Time magazine, Departures, and Town & Country.

Charles Q. Choi has written for Scientific American, The New York Times, Newsday, the San Diego Union-Tribune, Science, Nature, Popular Science and National Geographic News, among others, all as a freelance reporter. A graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism and resident of New York, Choi has also traveled to seven continents.

Since 1977, Bob Dietz has worked as a journalist in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the United States. He started as a freelance journalist in Tanzania, moving to Uganda after the departure of Idi Amin, and then to Somalia in 1981. He was a cameraman and bureau chief in Cairo and Beirut for Visnews, now Thomson Reuters TV, covering the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and its aftermath. He moved to Asia as a bureau chief for NBC News in Seoul and then in Manila, where he opened the network’s bureau shortly before the downfall of the Marcos regime. In 1995, Dietz moved to Hong Kong with his wife, Donna Liu, who opened CNNI’s Asia Production Center. After seven years as a senior editor at Asiaweek magazine, he returned to the United States and worked with the World Health Organization, handling media relations and risk communication during the SARS and avian influenza outbreaks. While at WHO, he worked closely with local and foreign reporters across Asia. Since starting at CPJ in January 2006, Dietz has continued to travel widely in Asia, including reporting trips and CPJ missions to Afghanistan, China and Hong Kong, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Thailand.

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of “Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class” (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream” (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review. A native of New Haven, Conn., he now lives in Washington, D.C.

Michael D’Souza is a Senior Writer and Producer at The National working primarily with foreign correspondents. Michael has been a journalist for 33 years. He’s worked at newspapers, freelanced for magazines and radio. At the CBC he’s worked in various capacities – from associate producer and foreign editor in radio, to Senior Writer and Producer in television. He has now returned to the National, where he started in television. Michael has reported from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, China and Finland. He has also worked for Radio Beijing in China for a year and taught journalism for two years at the University of Western Ontario in London. He’s active in the Canadian Media Guild, the union that represents most employees in the English Service of the CBC. He’s also active in the union at the national and international levels. His primary portfolio at all union levels is Human Rights and Equity.

Darren Foster is a senior producer for the Vanguard documentary series on Current TV. His reporting on the Iraq-Iran border earned him a spot on the list of finalists for the 2008 Livingston Awards for Young Journalists. After a short stint on Wall Street, Darren attended Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York. Shortly after graduating in 2002, he moved to Argentina where he was a reporter and editor for Latin America’s largest English-language daily, the Buenos Aires Herald. Since then, he has also written for the Miami Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, Business Traveler Magazine, the Huffington Post and he is currently a regular contributor to Frontline/World’s Dispatches. In 2003, Darren picked up a camera for the first time for an undercover report on Syrian mujahideen crossing into Iraq to fight against the US invasion, and has since produced stories ranging from China’s growing presence in Africa to searching for the fabled Kambo frog in the Brazilian Amazon. Darren’s television work has appeared on PBS’s Frontline/World, Channel 4 (UK), the CBC and now exclusively on Current TV.

V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan graduated in 2002 from Harvard College, in 2005 from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and in 2007 from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s new Master of Arts program. Her first novel, Love Marriage (Random House), was named one of Washington Post Book World’s Best of 2008 and long-listed for the Orange Prize. The book has also been or will be published in Canada, Italy, France, the U.K. and associated territories, Romania, Germany, India, and Serbia. This fall, she will begin teaching at the University of Michigan as the Zell Visiting Professor of Creative Writing. She has written and reported for The Atlantic Monthly, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sepia Mutiny, and The American Prospect, among others. She is a current board member and former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association. She also serves on the board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and on the graduate board of The Harvard Crimson. www.vasugi.com

Born in Iran,Kelly Golnoush Niknejad moved to the United States when she was 17. Starting out at a news agency in Southern California and a small newspaper in Massachusetts, she went on to earn two masters degrees in journalism from Columbia University, the first with an emphasis in print, and the second specializing in politics and government. Golnoush is on the board of the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association. She has reported for the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune and TIME Magazine among many publications. Before starting Tehran Bureau, she was a staff reporter at The National newspaper in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Her columns are syndicated by Agence Global and she serves as a consultant on Iran to ABC News.

Minal Hajratwala, longtime SAJA member, former San Jose Mercury News staffer, and author of Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). Leaving India is the first narrative nonfiction book to cover the breadth and depth of the Indian Diaspora, and has been called “incomparable” by Alice Walker and “searingly honest” by the Washington Post. As a journalist, she was an editor and reader representative (ombudsperson) at the San Jose Mercury News for eight years, a fellow in the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University, and a board member of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association.
http://www.minalhajratwala.com/

Dan Harris was named anchor of “World News Sunday” in November 2006. In addition to that role, he is a New York-based correspondent for ABC News’ broadcasts and platforms, including “World News with Charles Gibson,” “Good Morning America,” “Nightline,” ABC News Digital and ABC News Radio. Harris joined ABC News in March 2000. He has covered many of the biggest stories in recent years. He has reported from such diverse datelines as: Ground Zero, Pakistan, Afghanistan, South Korea, Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. He has also spent many months in Iraq — both before and after the US-led invasion. Harris has been honored several times for his journalistic contributions. His accolades include an Associated Press Award for political coverage, a regional Emmy for feature stories and a duPont Award for in-depth coverage.

Veteran journalist Steve Herman became VOA’s South Asia bureau chief in February, 2007 after nearly two decades based in Tokyo reporting for VOA and other broadcasters. He initially lived in the Japanese capital in the early 1980s as a news anchor and morning producer for the country’s first English language cable television channel. During the remainder of the 1980s, Steve worked in local television and radio newsrooms in Nevada and California before joining the Associated Press. At AP, Steve was State Broadcast Editor in West Virginia before moving to the AP’s Broadcast News Center in Washington, D.C.

Jeff Jarvis started his career as a newspaper writer, but has now become a passionate advocate for new media and citizen journalism. He has written What Would Google Do and blogs about media and news at Buzzmachine.com. He is associate professor and director of interactive journalism at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism. In addition, he writes a new media column for The Guardian and consults for media companies.

Anup Kaphle is an award-winning multimedia reporter and photographer currently based in Washington, DC. He works as a Digital Media Fellow for the Atlantic Media Company helping them research, launch and run news websites. His work has appeared in theAtlantic.com, NationalJournal.com, Forbes.com, WNET-New York, NYCinteractive.org, The Nepali Times and The Himalayan Times. Anup was recently awarded a SAJA Reporting Fellowship to work on a multimedia project in Afghanistan. He is also the winner of the 2008 Foreign Press Association scholarship and the 2008 Henry N. Taylor Award, given by Columbia Journalism School. Born in Pokhara, Nepal, Anup came to the United States in 2003. He has an M.S in journalism from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and a B.A. in English from Tusculum College in Greeneville, Tennessee.

Gary Kebbel joined the Knight Foundation as a Journalism Program officer in 2006 and promoted to Director in March 2008. He was news director at America Online, where he trained and directed the team that built AOL News into the world’s largest online news site. Before that, he helped create USAToday.com and Newsweek.com, and was a home page editor at washingtonpost.com. Most recently, Kebbel worked on the web site of Education Week, where he was in charge of content development, strategy and planning. He helped plan the successful switch of edweek.org from a free to a paid subscription website. He has served as the graphics editor at USA Today; taught online journalism as an adjunct instructor at the University of Maryland’s Phillip Merrill College of Journalism; and is a Fulbright Senior Specialist in online journalism.

Amitava Kumar is Professor of English at Vassar College and has written a novel and several works of literary non-fiction. His non-fiction book, “Husband of a Fanatic,” was on the Editors’ Choice list in The New York Times.

Daniel Lak started his working career as a civil servant but got a bug for journalism. He landed his dream job as BBC’s South Asia correspondent. In his 15 years there, he covered all the big stories. In 2000, he went freelance and moved to Kathmandu, Nepal. What was supposed to be a quiet interlude to work on a book and develop film scripts turned into a journalistic extravaganza with Lak in place to report the Nepalese Royal Massacre of 2001 and the Maoist rebellion that toppled the monarchy as his two main stories. He returned to North America to become BBC’s correspondent in Miami, but returned to Sri Lanka and South India in 2006 to cover the aftermath of the tsunami. Lak has published two books about India — Mantras of Change (2005), and India Express: the future of a new superpower (2008). Lak is now based in Toronto but his work as a political and media consultant for Washington DC-based Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids takes him to India for several months at a time.”

Vinnie Malhotra is executive producer of ABC News’ Weekend News Content, as well as the executive producer of Focus Earth with Bob Woodruff. At ABC News, he is responsible for the editorial content and production of the network’s two weekend evening news broadcasts, World News Saturday and World News Sunday, and oversees the weekend editorial content and production of ABC News’ digital platforms, including ABCNEWS.com and ABC News Now. He also serves as a senior producer of World News with Charles Gibson.

Alan Murray is deputy managing editor and executive editor, online, for The Wall Street Journal. He has editorial responsibility for the Journal’s websites, including WSJ.com and MarketWatch, and the Journal’s books, conferences and television operations. Mr. Murray is also the author of three best-selling books: Revolt in the Boardroom, The New Rules of Power in Corporate America, The Wealth of Choices: How the New Economy Puts Power in Your Hands and Money in Your Pocket and Showdown at Gucci Gulch: Lawmakers, Lobbyists and the Unlikely Triumph of Tax Reform, co-authored with Jeffrey Birnbaum. Gucci Gulch received the American Political Science Association’s Carey McWilliams Award in 1988. Mr. Murray also garnered two Overseas Press Club awards for his writings on Asia, as well as a Gerald Loeb award and a John Hancock award for his coverage of the Federal Reserve.

Naheed Mustafa is an award-winning journalist based in Toronto, Canada. She worked in print for eight years before moving into radio broadcasting in 2000. She’s worked in both news and current affairs and was, most recently, a show and documentary producer with CBC Radio’s foreign news program Dispatches. Naheed also produces her own documentaries focussing on stories from Kashmir, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Her work has been featured, among other places, on CBC Radio, CBC Television, Radio Netherlands, World Vision Report, and the Toronto Star.

Vasuki Nesiah teaches International Relations and is Director of International Affairs at Brown University. Her current research is on international interventions in conflict/post-conflict contexts. Before joining Brown Nesiah was Senior Associate and Head of the Gender Program at the International Center for Transitional Justice and Adjunct Associate Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia. She has published and lectured in international and comparative law, feminist theory, law and development, post-colonial studies, constitutionalism, and governance in plural societies. Nesiah completed her JD and her SJD in public international law at Harvard Law School. She is a moderator of http://lines-magazine.org/ , a descendant of lines magazine.

Ian Olds is a director of both narrative and documentary work. He and Garrett Scott directed the feature documentary Occupation: Dreamland, an in-depth portrait of a squad of American soldiers deployed in the doomed Iraqi city of Falluja. Occupation: Dreamland was short-listed for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and won a 2006 Independent Spirit Award for emerging documentary directors. Olds’ short fiction films have played at numerous festivals in the US and abroad including Sundance, Rotterdam and LA film festivals in 2007. Ian is a Princess Grace Award recipient and earned his MFA from Columbia University’s Film Division in 2006. Olds’ new film, Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi, examines the current crisis in Afghanistan through an investigation into the kidnapping and murder of a young Afghan translator.

Christian Parenti is a correspondent for the Nation and is author of The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (the New Press 2004). He received a PhD in sociology from the London Schoolof Economics in 2000. His two previous books are The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror, (Basic Books, 2003) and Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis, (Verso, 2000). He has been a Soros Senior Justice fellow and a Ford Foundation Fellow at the CUNY Graduate School’s Center for Place, Culture, and Politics.

Bilal Qureshi immigrated to the United States from Pakistan in 1993. As a product of two distinct cultures, he has learned firsthand the importance of communicating across lines. His multimedia master’s thesis on Muslim New Yorkers entitled ‘Defining Middle Ground’ (http://www.definingmiddleground.com) earned a national Webby Award. Bilal has worked for The Atlantic Monthly and contributed to The Daily Times – an English-language newspaper in Lahore, Pakistan. Bilal now works at NPR’s All Things Considered as a producer – focusing on international issues, technology, and the arts. He continues to file feature stories for the network’s various news magazines. He is fluent in spoken Urdu and Hindi, and proficient in Spanish.

A career journalist with 25 years of experience under his belt, Sunil Rao’s voyage of discovery began in Mumbai, India, at the Indian Express. While covering such staples as Dalal Street (India’s premier stock exchange) and the banking sector, he also began to explore such diverse topics as advertising and consumer protection, and the money involved in Bombay’s seamy underworld. He then worked in the Middle East, at Gulf News, for more than 15 years; the last position he held was that of UAE News Editor. Now Sunil lives in Toronto, Canada. He is the editor of South Asian Focus, a Metroland Media Group newspaper, which he helped launch two years ago. Sunil is married to Anitha; the couple has two children, a daughter and a son, and are learning new skills, such as skating and shoveling the driveway.

Felix Salmon is the “blog ambassador” at Reuters, where he writes about finance and helps tutor other journalists in blogging. A blogger since 1999, Salmon created the Economonitor blog for Roubini Global Economics and wrote the Market Movers blog for Conde Nast Portfolio from its launch in 1997 until he left for Reuters in March 2009. Business Pundit named Salmon one of the top bloggers in the business world in 2008, and his work is regularly cited by such writers as Paul Krugman of the New York Times.

Jon Sawyer is director of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a non-profit organization that funds independent reporting with the intent of raising the standard of media coverage of global affairs.

Angilee Shah is a reporter, editor and blogger experienced in local and international news, with a particular emphasis on Asia and issues of globalization, politics and culture. She is the former editor of AsiaMedia, an online press review about journalism and the business of journalism in Asia. Her work has appeared in Asian Geographic, Asia Pacific Arts and Time Out Singapore. She also contributes to Global Voices Online and The China Beat. A 2007-8 recipient of the South Asian Journalists Association Reporting Fellowship, Angilee reported on the Sri Lankan government’s counterinsurgency tactics for the Far Eastern Economic Review. A follow-up piece about access to information in the war zone was published in June.

Sarah Singh is an artist and filmmaker and descendant from one of India’s royal families. She was born in Patiala, Punjab, India and has lived in the United States since 1974. Much of her fine art from the last 15 years is included in private collections. Sarah has worked in the film and television industry in New York for over 5 years. Her work as a cinematographer, editor, director, and writer has been featured on MTV, Showtime, and the History Channel, along with many independent films.

Sree Sreenivasan is a technology expert and dean of students affairs at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he teaches in the digital journalism program. He specializes in explaining technology to consumers/readers/viewers/users. For more than eight years, he served as technology reporter for WABC-TV and WNBC-TV in NYC and occasionally on various ABC, NBC and MSNBC news programs. He has written articles for The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Rolling Stone, National Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes and Popular Science. He is a co-founder and former president of the South Asian Journalists Association , and has served as faculty adviser to Columbia’s chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Sreenivasan has a Master of Science degree in journalism from Columbia and a Bachelor of Arts in history from St. Stephen’s College, New Delhi. In March 2004, Newsweek magazine named him one of the nation’s 20 most influential South Asians. More on his work at http://www.sree.net and http://www.sreetips.com; Sree’s Twitter feed: http://www.twitter.com/sreenet

Photojournalist John Stanmeyer has spent the past decade focusing on Asia, including award-winning coverage of the AIDS epidemic and mental health issues, the 2004 tsunami, radical political changes in Indonesia, as well as dispatches from India, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Burma, Bangladesh, and Kashmir. He is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Capa Gold Medal, Magazine Photographer of the Year, and the World Press and Picture of the Year awards. Stanmeyer is co-founding member of VII photo agency, a contract photographer with Time Magazine since 1998, and works regularly on assignment with National Geographic magazine.

Brian Stelter is A TV Decoder and media reporter for The New York Times.

Samanth Subramanian is a staff writer with Mint, the Hindustan Times-Wall Street Journal business daily based in New Delhi. He has a Master’s in International Affairs from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a Bachelor’s in Journalism from Pennsylvania State University. In addition to Mint, he has written for The New Republic, the Far Eastern Economic Review, The National, the Hindu and the Indian Express.

Abigail Tucker is a staff writer for Smithsonian. Before joining the magazine in 2008, she was a reporter at The Baltimore Sun, where she received a National Headliner Award for feature writing and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s Mike Berger Award for human interest reporting. Her career has also included stints at the Glens Falls Post-Star, the Danbury News-Times, and the Southampton Press. She graduated from Harvard College in 2002.

Steve Wadhams began as a studio technician and then a producer for the BBC Overseas Services. In 1974, after two years making educational radio programmes in Malawi, Central Africa, he came to Canada to work on CBC’s flagship current affairs show “As it Happens”. In 1976, he was one of the founding producers of the new “Sunday Morning” show making documentaries from across Canada and around the world. In 1987, Steve moved to TV, spending two years as a documentary maker on the award winning show “The Journal”. Returning to radio in 1990, Steve developed and expanded his radio storytelling skills creating features of all types and lengths, ranging from the journalistic to the impressionistic. For many years, Steve has taught radio storytelling throughout the CBC and is a sought after teacher and consultant in Canada, the USA and Europe. Steve is currently a producer with the CBC programme “Outfront”, a forum for Canadians to tell their stories in styles which vary from dramatic monologue to experimental documentary.

Darius Walker is CNN’s New York bureau chief. In this capacity, Walker oversees all editorial resources and assignments for CNN’s team of correspondents, producers, photojournalists and editors based in CNN’s largest national bureau. He also oversees the business and financial news resources for CNN Worldwide. Prior to his New York assignment, Walker was the senior director of newsgathering for CNN’s Washington, D.C., bureau. Walker previously served as vice president of CNN Business News, where he managed business news coverage for CNN, CNNfn, Headline News and CNN Radio; served as supervising producer for CNNfn’s Atlanta operations and as senior producer for the business news program, Lou Dobbs Moneyline.

Sadia Zaman has spent her entire career in television, both on screen and behind the scenes. She is an award-winning writer, producer, host and interviewer who has created hundreds of hours of television. As Director of In-House Production at VisionTV, she launched two critically acclaimed, award-winning national shows and assembled and managed the in-house production team. She has also worked at CBC radio and television in Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan, as well as TVOntario. Sadia’s work has brought numerous awards and accolades, including three Gemini nominations. Shows she worked on won another two Geminis.

Mariana van Zeller is a correspondent and producer for the Vanguard documentary series on Current TV. Her reporting on the Iraq-Iran border earned her a spot on the list of finalists for the 2008 Livingston Awards for Young Journalists. Mariana began her journalism career in her native Portugal, where she was a producer and presenter for SIC Televisão, the nation’s largest private news channel. In 2001, she moved to New York to attend Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. In 2003, she went undercover to report on Syrian mujahideen crossing into Iraq to fight against the US invasion, and has since camped out in the Amazon jungle to cover the battle between Brazil’s Indians and miners over South America’s largest diamond mine, rode the Death Train to report on the desperate risks Central American migrants take to reach the US and snuck into the swamps of Nigeria to meet with militants fighting for control of the country’s oil wealth. Her work has appeared on PBS’s Frontline/World, the CBC, Channel 4 (UK) and now exclusively on Current TV. Mariana is fluent in Portuguese, English, Spanish, Italian and French.

Tom Zoellner is a newspaper and magazine journalist who became a full-time author four years ago. His book, The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit and Desire (St. Martins Press), reported from fourteen different countries, was named a “Notable Book of 2006” by the American Library Association and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. He is also the author of Uranium: A Biography (Viking/Penguin). He was previously a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle and a contributing editor at Men’s Health magazine. His first job was at a 5,000-circ. biweekly newspaper in Superior, Nebraska. http://www.tomzoellner.com/