Category: Speaker-23

Emma Bergmans is a safety specialist currently working on issues related to the online harassment of (women) journalists, legal intimidation of media workers, and the importance of media in exile in Free Press Unlimited’s Policy & Advocacy team. Previously, Bergmans coordinated FPU’s Safety & Emergency Assistance programme, providing rapid support to journalists worldwide facing a situation of distress and developing new interventions to improve the safety of journalists. She holds a Master’s degree in Conflict Studies & Human Rights and worked on the rights of refugees before joining Free Press Unlimited.

Twitter: @BergmansEmma, @freepressunltd

Julia Amberger is an award-winning investigative reporter and researcher based in Berlin. She reports mostly from African and European countries focusing on immersive storytelling and investigations. Amberger has uncovered a corrupt network within UNHCR offices in Uganda and Kenya and explored how blast fishing along the east African coast goes together with the smuggling of explosives. As she grew up in nature, she has a particular interest in environmental topics and how the value of certain species like tunas or pangolins is translated into buildings or weapons. Her stories are published in print magazines such as GEO, Stern, Internazionale, and REPORTAGEN in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, as well as the German radio station Deutschlandradio and the French-German TV channel Arte. Apart from her journalistic work, she is doing field research and data analysis for a German think tank.

Twitter: @juliaamberger

Jon West is a documentary filmmaker, freelance journalist, and researcher based in Finland. He has been working in the media industry since 1993. Jon’s recent works include, “Pedigree Dream”, a documentary trilogy about the European dog trade and “Syntynyt kauppatavaraksi” (Born as a Merchandise) a 10-episode adaptation of Pedigree Dream, aired in Finnish TV broadcaster EVEO 2023, and “Kuolemanjuoksu” (The Deathrun), a documentary film about a Finnish veterinarian rescuing mistreated galgos from Spain to Finland (Spanish greyhounds).
Dogs have always been part of Jon’s life and work. He has published two books about dogs and written several stories, magazine articles, and online articles about the animals, both fictional and informative. In June 2021, Jon West founded an association, Perro On The Road, to investigate the dog trade and consumer protection issues.

Ovidiu Stancu has a background as an independent video producer, being involved in various projects, such as documentaries, short and long feature films, working with internationally awarded directors from Romania such as Radu Jude, Paul Negoescu, and Marian Crisan. He is one of the in-house video producers for Vice Romania working on creating local content for Vice as well as on projects such as “A Curse On Corruption” for Vice UK. Being interested in unknown Romanian stories, Stancu sometimes manages to reveal the truth about the local exorcists in Romania through images.
Stancu has specialised and worked on investigations into animal welfare in Romania for the last ten years. Some projects have been independent, such as the film “Man’s Best Friend” for The Black Sea.
Together with Michael Bird he has formed a team that has worked as undercover investigators for Austrian charity Vier Pfoten to film abuses in dog shelters, and recently to expose chinchilla fur farms for Humane Society International, which was widely spread in the U.S. national press. This provoked a law change in Romania to abolish chinchilla and mink fur farming in 2022, which passed Romania’s lower parliament. Their work on animal welfare has been popular and impactful.

Tim Luimes is an investigative journalist specialising in corporate harm by the chemical, tobacco and food industry. He is deputy editor-in-chief at the Amsterdam-based journalism collective The Investigative Desk. He initiated the Forever Pollution Project, which revealed pollution by “forever chemicals” across Europe. Currently, he is focussing on exposing tax avoidance and evasion by Western multinationals in Africa.

Twitter: @tjluimes, @InvestigativeD

Journalist for more than seven years, Emmanuelle Picaud has investigated various subjects, from the ecological transition of architecture to academic research in the field of social sciences. She became a freelancer in 2021 after five years of writing in French specialised press as a section editor. Since this period, she has published investigations in the national and international press, in le Monde (France), the BBC (England), El Diario.es (Spain) and le Temps (Switzerland). In 2023 she was the coordinator of the European investigation “Cashing on carbon credits”, a series of articles that demonstrate how cement and siderurgy companies used free allowances to generate billions of profits on the European carbon market.
Regarding her academic background, she has a specialisation in scientific journalism (she has a master’s degree from Lille Lille School of Journalism in France), a master’s degree in Urbanism and a Bachelor’s in Philosophy. She regularly writes for newspapers specialised in these fields.
Picaud speaks French, English, and Chinese (Mandarin).

Twitter: @epicaud1

Giada Santana is an Italian – Dominican journalist based in Paris, focused on stories at the intersection of social justice and climate. Santana has a passion for audio stories, but works in print and video, as well. She recently published a multimedia, cross border investigation regarding the impact of hotter temperatures on the living and working conditions of agricultural workers in Spain and Italy.

Twitter: @giada_santana

Hanna Jarzabek lived in Geneva between 1996 and 2008, where she finished her Master’s in Political Science and worked as an analyst-political scientist, preparing reports on refugees for UN agencies such as UNRWA, OCHA, UNCTAD. She developed her passion for documentary photography on trips to the Philippines, the Gaza Strip and Iran (2001, 2002-2003 and 2008 respectively). Based in Spain since 2008, Jarzabek combines her work as a documentary photographer and freelance photojournalist with teaching at the EFTI International Center for Photography and Film (Madrid). Her reports were published in El País, Newsweek Japan, XL Semanal, BuzzFeed News, L’Obs, Internazionale, Equal Times, 5W magazine, Interviú, Le Temps Magazine, 7k magazine, Gazeta Wyborcza, and Polityka, among others.

Photo by: Ana Valiño

Twitter: @HannaJarzabek
Instagram: @hanna_jar

Albert Lores is a Spanish photojournalist, based in Kyiv, Ukraine since 2017. He contributes regularly to Le Figaro and El Mundo, and has been reporting on the Russo-Ukrainian war since 2014. His work has also been published in outlets like Vice, Liberation, Delft, and Tagesspiegel among others. Before his focus on Ukraine, Albert covered areas including Indian-controlled Kashmir, Kachin State in Myanmar, Transnistria in Moldova and Abkhazia in Georgia. His photographs have been exhibited in several venues across Europe.

Twitter: @lores_albert

Louis Goddard is co-founder of Data Desk, an investigative consultancy, where he leads the research function. He previously worked at Global Witness and The Times of London producing data-driven investigations, including as part of a high-impact campaign against Russian fossil fuel exports. He studied at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and has a PhD from the University of Sussex.

Twitter: @ltrgoddard