Who We Are

Journalism Initiative on Gender-Based Violence Team

Cathy Otten is the Senior Program Lead for the Institute for Women's Leadership's Journalism Initiative on Gender-Based Violence. She is also a Visiting Global Associate at Rutgers University's Institute for Women's Leadership.

Cathy is an award-winning British journalist, lecturer and author of With Ash On Their Faces: Yezidi Women and the Islamic State (OR books 2017). The Los Angeles Review of Books described With Ash on Their Faces as: "The best kind of humanist journalism: lucid, transparent, grimly realistic.… (N)o book has covered it better.” Cathy worked as a reporter in the UK, and then as a correspondent in Iraq for the Independent and others. In her book, Cathy wrote about trans generational resistance to slavery among Iraq’s Yezidis. In 2018, she won the One World Media New Voice Award and was a finalist for the Kurt Schork Memorial Award for courage in journalism. Cathy has published a series of investigations into corruption at Balad airbase in Iraq, and an investigative feature into the murder of a prominent female activist in Baghdad. Her journalism has been supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the Carey Institute, where she was a Nonfiction Writing Fellow in 2018. Portrait by Alice Martins.

Global Journalism Initiative Advisory Group

Sherizaan Minwalla (Human rights lawyer & researcher in transitional justice, ethical documentation of CRSV, refugee resettlement & asylum protection, & access to justice )
Brandi Morin (French/Cree/Iroquois journalist and author from Treaty 6 in Alberta, Canada)

ASIA

Nupur Basu (Independent journalist and award-winning documentary filmmaker, India)
Evi Mariani (Co-founder and chief editor of Project Multatuli, a journalism initiative focusing on serving the marginalized in Indonesia. Former Managing Editor at the Jakarta Post)
Krishanti Dharmaraj (Human rights advocate and a practitioner, former Executive Director of the Center for Women's Global Leadership, Rutgers University)
Melissa Upreti (Lawyer, human rights expert and member of the UN working group on discrimination against women and girls)

PACIFIC

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson (Pacific Island Journalist & Scholar, Co-founder of Women in Climate Change Samoa)

MIDDLE EAST

Rana Husseini (Senior Journalist, Jordan Times, Human Rights Activist, Award Winner and Author)

LATIN AMERICA

Aimee Vega Montiel (Chair of UNESCO Global Alliance on Media and Gender; Women’s human rights and media scholar, National Autonomous University of Mexico)
Mona Lisa Dourado (Former reporter and executive editor at the Jornal do Commercio Communication System of Pernambuco, Brazil)

EUROPE

Liz Ford (Deputy Editor of The Guardian’s Global development website, London)
Cosette Thompson (Human rights activist and non profit consultant, former Western Regional Director of Amnesty International USA, co founder and former lead of the Journalism Initiative on Gender-Based Violence)

AFRICA