Author: SummBirn

Stavros is a reporter and editor. He has worked for the Agence France-Presse and inside story, and has participated in cross-border investigations with Lighthouse Reports and Investigate Europe. He’s a member of Reporters United. His reports have been published in European media. He was shortlisted for the European Press Prize ‘21 and won the IJ4EU Impact Award ‘22. In 2019 he was selected as a fellow for BIRN’s Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence (BFJE). He has been trained in data journalism at Columbia University in New York on a fellowship.

Apostolis covers EU policy issues including developments in population movement, security and defence, privacy and big data policies. In the past, he has co-operated with many international media outlets and organisations. He has authored numerous reports, published two books on EU migration and border control policies and has been a member of numerous cross-border investigations. He currently co-operates with investigative outlet Solomon and also works as a freelance researcher.

Eleni joined BIRN Hub in 2021 as a Communications Manager. She is a data journalist based in Athens, Greece. She has worked for Greek and foreign media and the NGO SolidarityNow. Eleni has covered a big range of issues: migration, refugee crisis, corruption, LGBTI and human rights, politics, business, sports, environment, health and culture.
Eleni is a Fellow of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation and Columbia Journalism School 2019.
Eleni has a BA in Balkan Studies from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and an MA in Social Anthropology (Europe) from Sussex University, United Kingdom.
She speaks Greek, English, Turkish and Serbian.

Alison Killing is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and licensed architect specialising in open source and visual investigations. She worked in architecture and urban planning practices in London and Rotterdam for several years, before starting her own studio, Killing Architects. Since then she has produced and curated an exhibition on death and architecture called Death in Venice, carried out research into the reconstruction in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake and developed Migration Trail, a mapped data visualisation about migration to Europe.

In 2021 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, together with Megha Rajagopalan and Christo Buschek for a series of articles exposing the network of detention camps in Xinjiang, China. This work used satellite imagery and architectural expertise, as well as interviews with two dozen former detainees, to identify and investigate this vast new infrastructure.

Laurent is a French award-winning documentary filmmaker, producer, and founder of Forbidden Stories, a global network of journalists whose mission is to pursue the investigations of reporters who have been murdered, jailed or threatened. Richard has directed documentaries for 20 years; he was a Knight-Wallace Fellow in 2017 at the University of Michigan and he was also named European Journalist of the year 2018 by the Prix Europa in Berlin.

Since its creation, Forbidden Stories has won numerous awards including the prestigious “European Press Prize”, two Georges Polk Awards or the “Reporters Without Borders Impact Award” for the “Pegasus Project” published in 2021.

Documentary producer, Laurent Richard has produced, among others, the series “Green Blood” which won the Europa Award for the best European documentary series in 2020 and is currently producing several documentaries for PBS Frontline, BBC and Arte.

To further protect journalists, Laurent Richard has created the Safebox Network, a unique tool that allows the most threatened journalists to protect their ongoing investigations and to let those who would silence them know that they are no longer alone. The launch of Forbidden Stories’ Safebox Network was announced at the 2022 World Press Freedom Day conference in Uruguay. Since then, more than 50 journalists around the world have already protected their investigations using the Safebox Network.

Sandrine Rigaud is a French investigative journalist. As editor of Forbidden Stories since 2019, she coordinated the “Pegasus Project” published in July 2021 and the “Cartel Project,” a massive cross-border collaboration to finish the investigations of a murdered Mexican journalist that won a George Polk Award and the Maria Moors Cabot Prize.

Before joining Forbidden Stories, she directed feature length documentaries for French television. Her films have been shortlisted or awarded in multiple festivals, including DIG, Europa, Fipadoc, FIGRA, SeoulEco. She has reported from Tanzania, Uzbekistan, Lebanon, Qatar and Bangladesh.

In 2008, she co-wrote a book on the war of the socialist tenors in France. Of Egyptian origin, she grew up in the Middle East where she still travels regularly.

Michael has led collaborations with the Associated Press, Frontline and the BBC, among many other news organizations.

Previously, he was a senior reporter with American Public Media and a producer at CBS news.  He began his career in eastern Europe where he covered the fall of communism and wars in former Yugoslavia. His reporting on human rights violations in Kosovo led to multiple criminal prosecutions and sparked the creation of a special war crimes chamber in The Hague. In 2022 his reporting on forced labor in the Dominican sugar industry led the United States to block imports from the country’s top producer.

Montgomery’s honors include Peabody, DuPont, Murrow, Third Coast, IRE and Overseas Press Club awards.  He is a longtime member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Mar Cabra is a Co-founder, chairman of the Board and trainer at The Self-Investigation. She is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, digital wellness educator and Acumen fellow working on raising awareness on how technology is changing the way we interact with ourselves, each other and as a society. She writes a column in Spanish newspaper El Confidencial on this topic. She’s committed to creating a healthier working culture in journalism to prevent others from burning out like she did after leading the technology and data work for the Panama Papers investigation.