John Klopotowski is a freelance journalist and translator based in Northern California and is currently interning for The World. He speaks Arabic and Turkish. John has recently enjoyed reporting on local politics and current events in Oakland, CA—some of this coverage can be read in Oaklandside. He spends his free time wrapping grape leaves and walking his Old English Sheepdog, Augie.

Uzair Ahmed, a Berklee College of Music graduate from Pakistan, elevates storytelling with the power of sound and music. A skilled audio engineer and producer, Uzair brings his global influences and a genre-infusing approach to projects across different mediums.

Hatiye Garip is an illustrator, comic artist and designer based in Istanbul, Turkey. She likes to draw birds, flowers and ordinary moments. Her works have been exhibited and published in many countries, including Portugal, Belgium, Lithuania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, South Korea, the USA and UK. She was one of the Adobe Creative Residency Community Fund 2020 recipients in last December. She has recently completed her first picture book Making My Own Way, which focuses on her childhood memories with her grandmother. Hatiye illustrated our third and fourth seasons, and the art for our website. You can see her works at hatiyegarip.com.

Ibby Caputo is a journalist based in the United Kingdom. She was the Senior Editor of “Overheard” at National Geographic for the first three seasons. She has worked as a story editor for The World and West Virginia Public Broadcasting and for several podcasts including “The Breakthrough” from ProPublica, and “Seeking Peace” from the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security.

Chris Harland-Dunaway is a senior producer at The World. He splits his time between chasing interviews for the daily edition of the show and working on longform audio projects like, “Lethal Dissent.” Before joining The World, he was a freelance reporter and producer. He’s produced extensively for Reveal and written investigative features for The Verge.  He’s a graduate of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism where he concentrated on investigative reporting and audio. Outside of journalism, Chris loves riding and racing his road bike.

Beril Eski is an investigative journalist based in Istanbul. Her work focuses on immigration, government accountability and gender across Turkey. She has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times and more. With over a decade of reporting, she was part of a team with the New York Times that won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 2024. She has also received the Overseas Press Club Award of America, The New York Times Publisher’s award and the Polk Awards with other investigative colleagues. Native in Turkish and fluent in English, she is still working on Arabic.

Born in Livingstone, Zambia, Lewis Yuyi is a radio presenter and producer currently with Radio Christian Voice.  Previously, Yuyi was a presenter and producer with Zambezi FM, which had a listenership not only in Zambia but also in nearby Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Namibia. Yuyi is the youngest of seven children.

Alexandra Tyan is a Russian-born multimedia journalist currently based in Rome, Italy. A Sciences Po and LSE graduate, she has worked with Coda Story, GIJN, France Télévisions, her work has been published in The Guardian, The Calvert Journal, The Moscow Times, RFI, France Info, Istituto Affari Internazionali, and VC.ru. She also co-produces Obvious, a podcast about overlooked aspects of obvious things. She reports and writes in English, Russian, French and Italian.

Bartholomäus Laffert, born in 1995, is a freelance journalist currently based in Addis Ababa. He´s mainly working for radio and print media on migration and the externalization of the EU’s outer borders. For this purpose, he traveled in the past years to the Balkans, East Africa, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and the Central Med. He´s reporting for outlets like Der Spiegel, Deutsche Welle, The Guardian, The New Humanitarian, ZDF and Deutschlandfunk.

Angel Bwalya Kasabo is a radio presenter at Radio Christian Voice in Zambia.  He grew up in Lusaka, and was a fan of radio since he was a child, although back then he did not see himself as having a career in radio.  A graduate of Copperstone University in Kitwe, Zambia, Kasabo is an avid sports player as well, enjoying football, tennis, and swimming.

Moritz Heidegger is an audio engineer and composer based in Vienna, Austria. He is currently working as a freelancer in a broad spectrum of fields ranging from music production, recording, mixing and mastering to sound design and film scoring, working with pretty much everything involving sound with great love for detail. He has been studying sound engineering since 2016 at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.

Judith Chetrit is a Paris-based features writer and audio documentary producer. She mostly covers labour issues and public policies. Her clients include French public radio (Radio France, France Culture…), Le Monde Diplomatique, and specialized publications such as magazines focused on social and economic issues.

Kukka Maria Ahokas is Finnish author and journalist for the culture magazine Voima. Principally, she writes reports and chronicles for the print press.  In addition to her native Finnish language, she works in Spanish, English and Swedish.  She has close ties to Peru, where she has lived on several occasions. In 2021, she works in Lima with a grant from the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture, writing a non-fiction book on Gen Z political activism.

Astrig Agopian is a French-Armenian freelance journalist based between Paris and Yerevan. Born and raised in Marseille, she earned a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and a Master’s degree in Journalism and International Affairs from Sciences Po Paris. She works as a reporter and camerawoman and has been published in various media (print, radio, TV) : Agence France-Presse, Euronews, Radio Télévision Suisse,The Guardian and others.

Nafisa Haji is an American novelist of Indo-Pakistani descent, acclaimed for her explorations of identity, displacement, and cultural heritage. Born in Los Angeles, she spent parts of her childhood in Karachi, Manila, Chicago, and London, experiences that deeply inform her storytelling. Her debut novel, The Writing on My Forehead, was a finalist for the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award. Her second novel, The Sweetness of Tears, continues her examination of personal and political boundaries. With a background in American history and education from UC Berkeley and UCLA, and experience teaching in bilingual classrooms, Haji brings a nuanced perspective to her work. She resides in Northern California with her family and maintains close ties to Pakistan.

Nadene Ghouri is the host of On Spec’s Season Four.

An award-winning journalist specialising in human interest and human rights issues, Nadene freelances for major publications including The Guardian and The Mail On Sunday and is a former correspondent of both the BBC and Al Jazeera English. Nadene has reported from around the globe, including the Middle East, Africa and Asia. She lived for 7 years in Afghanistan, and is widely regarded as a specialist on Afghan issues.

Today she also works as a screenwriter and is a New York Times bestselling non-fiction author.

Alisa Zaira Reznick is a journalist and photographer from Flagstaff, Arizona. After several years in Amman, Jordan she returned to Arizona to document migration, human rights and the environment from a new border. Her work has appeared in Al Jazeera, Mother Jones, NPR, PRX’s The World and the BBC, among others. She currently covers border and immigration issues for Tucson’s NPR affiliate, Arizona Public Media. 

Born next to the Bosphorus, Özge Sebzeci is a documentary and portrait photographer based between Turkey and Germany focusing on stories about gender, migration and ecology. Her approach revolves around establishing trust and intimacy with the people she photographs. She is deeply committed to diverse perspectives in visual storytelling. Sebzeci is a grantee with the National Geographic Society and Magnum Foundation. Her work has been published in National Geographic, Time, Die Zeit, NPR, The Atlantic, NRC Handelsblad,  De Standaard, Horizonte, VG, and 140journos among others. She is a member of Women Photograph and Diversify Photo and Varız Buradayız.

Pesha, who grew up in a circus, spent two years in a smokey newsroom in Cairo. She gave up the desk to freelance, writing extensively about refugees, gender and conflict in Egypt, Turkey, and Iraq. Her work has appeared in outlets including Foreign Policy, the Guardian, the Daily Beast, the New York Review of Books, the Intercept, and PRI. Pesha speaks Arabic and Spanish.

A physicist turned journalist, Umar’s reporting includes breaking news and investigative features, spanning four continents. He is a recipient of grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting and the National Geographic Society. He has been a correspondent for The Los Angeles Times, Reuters, and Al Jazeera English, reporting from the Middle East and South Asia, and a national investigative reporter with ProPublica. His work has also appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Atlantic, the Nation, the Intercept, National Geographic, the Wall Street Journal, and the Christian Science Monitor. Born in Pakistan and raised in New Orleans, he is fluent in Urdu and can do pretty well in Arabic and Turkish.