ÁFRICA AND THE CARIBBEAN
Alexandre Moniz Barbosa
The Times of India
Alexandre Moniz Barbosa is a journalist and writer, currently executive editor of the English Daily Herald. He was the assistant resident editor of the Goa edition of The Times of India and before that with the magazine Goa Today. He has published four books – “Touched By The Toe”, “Passionate and Unrestrained”, “Goa Rewound”, and “Raw Earth”. In December 2013 he won the Alban Couto Award for best short story in the Goan Short Story competition for the story “You’ll Get Nothing Tomorrow”
Antonio Pita (Brasil)
Estado de São Paulo
Antonio Pita was born in Salvador, Brazil and has been based in Rio de Janeiro for five years where he works at the news agency a Estado de S. Paulo, as an economics, oil and gas reporter. He has also worked in cultural journalism, politics and cities, and has produced publications about media and racism, such as the “Guide to Combat Black Youth Extermination”, from the Roberto Marinho Foundation and the Department of Youth.
Brenda Medina (República Dominicana)
Nuevo Herald
Brenda Medina is a local news reporter at el Nuevo Herald, in Miami. She covers social issues, crime and local government, and has worked on investigative projects. Brenda has reported about the regulation of public art and the cultural contributions of immigrants to South Florida. She recently wrote about a group of black Dominican models who are defying their country’s Eurocentric beauty standards. As an International Center for Journalists, fellow, Brenda traveled to the Dominican Republic in 2014 to report on the lives of Iraq war veterans from the island. She studied journalism at the University of South Florida and studied abroad at the Federal University of Maranhão, Brazil, in the summer of 2009.
Georgina Godwin
Monocle 24
Georgina Godwin is an independent broadcast journalist. She is Books Editor for Monocle 24 and presenter of the in-depth interview show “Meet the Writers”. She is also a frequent presenter of current affairs programmes and a commentator on Southern African politics. Georgina has interviewed a wide range of public figures from literary giants and debut novelists to prominent politicians, musicians and artists, for a diverse range of media outlets. Born in Zimbabwe, and educated there and at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts, London, she was a founder member of SWRadio Africa and of the Harare International Festival of the Arts. She serves on the board of the charity, Developing Artists.
Laura Anaya (Colombia)
El Universal Cartagena
Laura Anaya Garrido was born in July 1990 and lived in a small town called Guaymaral, Bolívar until she was 12 years old. Due to the dangers presented by the FARC in Central Bolívar, her parents, David and Elisa, were forced to send her to study in Cartagena to finish high school to protect her from the paramilitary and guerrilla violence. In 2006, she graduated high school and in 2007 began studying social communication and journalism at the University of Cartagena. In 2013, two years after finishing her degree, Anaya began working at one of Editora del Mar’s publications, El Teso, a popular tabloid. Two years later, after exploring every corner of the city looking for stories of victims of common violence, she started writing for the Sunday supplement of El Universal de Cartagena called Facetas, chronicles, reporting and interviews with no defined theme. Today, she is the editor of Facetas and the cultural and tabloid sections.
Lori Robinson (Estados Unidos)
Washington Post
Lori Robinson is an award-winning journalist whose work has been published in The Washington Post, Ebony.com, The Detroit Free Press, Chicago Tribuneand several national magazines. She is the author of «I Will Survive: The African-American Guide to Healing from Sexual Assault and Abuse.» She was selected as a 2013 Fellow by the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. In 2016, she was selected as one of 12 International Center for Journalists (ICJ) “Bringing Home The World” fellows.
Mariela Fullana (Puerto Rico)
El Nuevo Día
Mariela Fullana Acosta is a Puerto Rican cultural and investigative journalist with 16 years of experience. She has worked for various Puerto Rican media including El Nuevo Día, where she currently works. As a journalist, she has paid special attention to coverage on women in the arts, and reported on the complex world of Puerto Rican pop music and has documented the effervescent experimental and alt scene in her country.
Juan Fernando Andrade (Ecuador)
Revista Diners
Juan Fernando Andrade was born in Portoviejo, a little city in the Pacific Coast of Ecuador, in 1981. He published his first collection of short stories at the age of 23, and has been a writer ever since. Andrade studied film in college; he has work with many directors in his country and one of his non-fiction pieces was adapted to the big screen and released in 2011, the movie (and offbeat comedy) is called “Pescador” and to the day is one of the most popular films in Ecuadorian cinema. Andrade has also made a side-career as a musician, he has recorded three albums as the drummer of the rock band “Los Pescados”, and is frequently involved in other music projects as a lyricist. He’s currently the contributing editor of Revista Mundo Diners, a cultural magazine that has been around for more than 30 years, and is actually working on his second novel.
Karim Ganem (Colmbia)
El Malpensante
Karim Ganem was born in Barranquilla in 1991 to parents of Lebanese descent and grew up on San Andres Island. He is a lawyer specialising in literature and photography. Ganem spent time in New York to perfect his English and did an internship at the Colombian Embassy in Cairo, Egypt. Besides his diplomatic duties, he was in charge of writing political memos for the Chancellery during the 2013 coup. He has also worked in the Colombian Senate and the Constitutional Court. Shortly before finishing his degree, Ganem and four others founded Contraluz, where they search for cultivate young artists. At the beginning of 2015, he began to write at El Malpensante, where he is currently a writer and junior editor. There, he has written chronicles interviews and editorials; he has covered the Cartagena Film Festival and served as book editor. His poetry and and fiction have also appeared in Revista de la Universidad del Rosario Reloj de Arena and, recently, an interview and music critique in Rolling Stone.
Mebrak Tarek (Eritrea)
Freelance
Mebrak Tareke is a writer, curator and, an independent media & communication professional. She has written for Hyperallergic, Another Africa, Kilimanjaro, and Contemporary And on art, politics and culture in the African diaspora. She is specifically interested in exploring the aesthetics of memory, loss, longing and trauma, from a post-colonial/anthropological perspective. Mebrak has been living between Brooklyn, Europe and the Horn of Africa for a few years. In 2013, she co-founded Turf, a curatorial project that explores the arbitrary notion of Africana in the digital age, its ebbs and flows. Mebrak has also curated shows at Artsy, cutlog NY and Spring Break Art Show. In 2016, she was on the Advisory Committee at Africa’sout!, which advances radical change for the sexual rights of LGBTQIs of African descent, through art and activism. Mebrak holds an MSc in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics (2001) and a BA in Modern European Studies (2000) from University College London, where she focused on Spanish and Latin American Studies.
Natalia Roa (Colombia)
Vice
Natalia Roa is a wanderer. She has lived between Cali, Bogotá and the Colombian Caribbean coast. She studied Social Communication and Literary Studies. She has been publisher of art books, literature and graphic novel and has collaborated with different media such as the german magazine Solkes, Reloj de Arena and VICE magazine which she writes about African heritage music. She also works on cultural production and promotion. Additionally, she is co-founder of Ashé, a non-profit organization that focuses on research, teaching and dissemination of musical Community cultures from the Colombian Caribbean and Pacific coasts through an ethnic and colonial perspective.
Nicolás Vallejo (Colombia)
Pacifista
Head of music for Vice Colombia and editorial director of both local versions of Noisey and Thump, he has concentrated his career both as an editor and a journalist in generating narratives that contribute with a vision of past, present and future of Colombia’s diverse musical landscape, so as to offer perspectives on issues such as identity and generational politics. Founder of ¡Pacifista!, a journal dedicated to war and peace in his country, he also reflects on this subjects with his band, La MiniTK del Miedo, with which he has played extensively in his homeland, and in stages in USA, Brazil, Mexico, Germany and Poland.
Salym Fayad (Colombia)
Freelance
Salym Fayad is an independent journalist, documentary photographer and cultural promoter from Bogotá based in Johannesburg since 2008. He has travelled and worked extensively in different regions of sub-Saharan Africa covering topics related to music, cinema and pop culture, migration, conflict and human rights. His texts and photographs have appeared in como The New York Times, The Boston Review, European Pressphoto Agency, VICE, Mail & Guardian, Sunday Times, Libération, El Tiempo, Arcadia, Gatopardo and El Malpensante, among others.
His photographic and audiovisual work has been exhibited in New York, Berlin, Helsinki, Paris, Addis Ababa, Johannesburg and Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo. Currently, he is working on a multimedia project documenting social and cultural practices from the Somali diaspora in Johannesburg.
Fayad has worked in the promotion of intercultural exchange projects in Colombia and South Africa, including the participation of the South African grouo BLK JKS in the Rock al Parque festival, and the performances of Colombian bands Sidestepper, Bomba Estereo and La 33 in Johannesburg, and the participation of Llorona Records at the Moshito Music Conference.
Wana Udobang (Nigeria)
BBC Radio4
Wana Udobang is a multimedia journalist, writer, poet and filmmaker. Her work is at the intersection of women’s rights, human interest stories, art and culture. She has worked with BBC Radio4, BBC world service, 92.3 Inspiration FM, Aljazeera, Guardian UK, Brittle Paper and The Huffington Post. In 2016 she was long listed for the One World Media award in the Women’s rights in Africa award category. She is a recipient of the International Reporting Project(IRP) fellowship. A Farafina Creative Writers Workshop alumni, her short stories and poems have been published in anthologies and journals. As a performance poet she has graced the stages of numerous festivals across the African continent and her spoken word album titled ‘Dirty Laundry’ was released in 2013. Her poems have been featured at the British Library’s Word, Symbol and Song exhibition. Wana is the producer of the documentary Sensitive Skin, the poetry series Words and Inspirations, and the interview series Culture Diaries. She hosts the television show Airtel Touching Lives.
María Luz Nóchez (El Salvador)
El Faro
María Luz Nóchez is a professional communicator, copy editor and journalist. Over the past five years she has been in charge of the cultural section of El Faro whose coverage has a wide range of exploration from political decisions and limited access to the cultural expressions and the inequality that the indigenous population faces, to the trafficking of archeological heritage. She has participated in journalism specialization courses in Colombia, Costa Rica and El Salvador. Nóchez also works as a freelance copy editor and teaches creative writing to university students.