Conference: Media, Democracy and Governance
Ochberg Fellowship Application Deadline
About
People
Dart Center core activities are the responsibility of the following leadership, staff and volunteer personnel.
Executive Director
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Bruce Shapiro is executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, encouraging innovative reporting on violence, conflict and tragedy worldwide from the Center’s headquarters at Columbia University in New York City. An award-winning reporter on human rights, criminal justice and politics, Shapiro is a contributing editor at The Nation and U.S. correspondent for Late Night Live on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National.
As an investigative journalist and commentator Shapiro has covered terrain ranging from inner-city neighborhoods to the chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court. Beginning in the mid-1990s Shapiro began extensive reporting on crime victims and American society, and documented the intersection of politics and violence on issues ranging from capital punishment to combat trauma. He was national correspondent for Salon.com, and wrote for the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian and numerous other publications worldwide
Shapiro’s most recent book is Shaking the Foundations: 200 Years of Investigative Journalism in America (Nation Books). He is co-author of Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and America's Future, with Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (New Press). He teaches investigative journalism at Yale University, and has been featured as a commentator on the BBC, CNN, Fox News and NPR.
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, New York City
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Kate Black manages the Dart Awards for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma, as well as conferences and special projects. Prior to joining the Dart Center, she spent seven years as a program officer at the Open Society Institute/Soros Foundation, where she directed the Soros Justice Fellowships and founded and directed the Katrina Media Fellowships.
She was a Coro Fellow in Public Affairs in New York and a Princeton Project '55 Fellow in Washington D.C. She has served on the selection committees of several social documentary, media and advocacy awards programs.
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Stan Alcorn writes, edits and produces content for the Dart Center's website and blog. He has written, edited and shot video for publications including the Orange County Register, The Nation Magazine and Chinese web portal Netease.
University of Washington, Seattle
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Meg Spratt is Associate Director of Academic Programs for the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma and a lecturer in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. With more than 20 years experience as a journalist and journalism educator, her research interests include news coverage of tragedy, race and gender, and political communication, with an emphasis on photojournalism.
Her work has been published in American Journalism; Visual Communication Quarterly; Journalism; The Howard Journal of Communication; Popular Communication; and Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly.
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Sue Lockett-John
Research Associate
Sue Lockett John, Ph.D., contributes to research, training and outreach to journalism educators for the Dart Center. She is a former newspaper reporter and editor and a freelance writer, editor and project manager.
Her research has explored such topics as news treatment of crime victims and their loved ones; the effects of head-to-head competition on local news; and press coverage of the Bush administration's strategic speech.
Dart Centre Australasia
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Cait McMahon PhD (Cand.) is a registered psychologist and fulltime managing director of Dart Centre Australasia, with headquarters in Melbourne, Australia and activities throughout the Asia Pacific region. McMahon has been interested in the nexus of journalism and trauma since working as staff counsellor at The Age newspaper in Melbourne, Australia in the mid ‘80’s and 90’s. This interest resulted in postgraduate research in the area in 1993 with subsequent publications.
To date, Cait is the only Australian psychologist to be published in the area of journalism and trauma. She has a significant history of clinical private practice, organisational development consulting and employee assistance programs. Cait continues to pursue further research at Swinburne University in Melbourne into journalism and trauma, focussing on both post-traumatic growth and post-traumatic stress experienced by news media professionals.
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Farida Mahri coordinates Dart activities in Indonesia in collaboration with Dart Australasia and Yayasan Pulih. Farida has a graduate degree in social sciences and has previously worked in both media and human rights organisations.
Her many skills have enabled her to work with child trafficking, woman's rights, economic development and social transformation issues to name a few. In many of these environments Farida worked in media roles and was the Chief Editor for the Journalists Independence Alliance publications
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Jim Tully
Country Contact, New Zealand Network
Jim Tully is Head of School and Program Director, Journalism, in the School of Political Science and Communication at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He holds a Master of Arts with Honours and a Graduate Diploma in Journalism and teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses. He also researches in the areas of media ethics, science communication and foreign news.
Before moving into academia in 1987, Tully worked for 18 years in daily newspapers, becoming editorial manager and assistant editor of The Auckland Star and editor of weekend newspaper 8 O'Clock.
While Pacific Affairs writer for The Auckland Star he was inaugural winner of the New Zealand Journalist of the Year Award for coverage of the Cook Islands election scandal.
Later, as an editorial executive, he had delivered in-house training. During his career, Tully has been a member of the Journalists' Training Board, chair of the Auckland Institute of Technology's Journalism Advisory Committee, and a former president of the Northern Journalists' Union.
Tully has just been commissioned to write the new national journalism text by the industry organisation which oversees journalism training in New Zealand. He is also editing a book on risk communication.
Tully has been a UNESCO consultant on journalism in Western Samoa and the Cook Islands and has also been the New Zealand Vice Chancellors' Committee representative on the National Advisory Committee on Media Studies.
Dart Centre Europe
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Gavin Rees, a journalist and filmmaker, is the director of Dart Centre Europe. Based in London, he co-ordinates the Dart Centre’s activities across Europe. Over the last 13 years he has worked in a variety of broadcast media, producing business and political news for Financial Times Television and CNBC and international news for Japanese networks. He has also worked on drama and documentary films for the BBC, Channel 4, as well as for other broadcasters and a number of independent film companies.
Gavin’s interest in how people relate traumatic narratives developed as a result of interviewing survivors of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima for a BBC documentary drama, which won an International Emmy in 2006. Afterwards Gavin took up a post as a research fellow at the Centre for Public Communication in the Media School at Bournemouth University, where he investigated how journalists interview people at the centre of stories which arouse strong emotions. Gavin has also done academic research into the political impact of violence on communities, and holds masters degrees in both social anthropology, as well as in contemporary history and politics. Between 1997 and 1999 he was a Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation Scholar. His writing has appeared in the British Journalism Review, the New Statesman, the Guardian and a number of specialist magazines on topics related to film, psychology and the media.
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Petra Tabeling is a freelance print and radio journalist based in Germany. The topics she focuses on include migration, press freedom and the safety of journalists; and she has covered Northern Ireland for many years. Petra has contributed to WDR, Deutschlandfunk, Deutsche Welle, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Neue Züricher Zeitung and qantara.de, among others.
Her former positions include German correspondent for Reporters Without Borders and roles as an editor and correspondent for Deutsche Welle. In 2006 she was awarded a Dart Center Ochberg Fellowship, and since then has worked to establish the Dart Center in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
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Anne Bourges is a journalist on the French daily newspaper La Montagne. For more than 15 years she has been covering crime, social affairs and general news. She began writing for French regional papers in the early 1990s after a period working on publications in Canada. Since 2007 she has been involved in creating a Dart network for France and the Francophone world.
Anne has a diploma in trauma psychology and participates regularly in interdisciplinary forums that address violence, its psychological impact on individuals and the role of the media. She is also active in training students and professional journalists in meeting the challenges posed when covering violent events.
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Elaine Cobbe is a seasoned news journalist with more than 20 years of experience of covering international events. A correspondent for CBS News, she is based in Paris and has reported from around the world, including Iraq, Kosovo and Rwanda. She is also a regular commentator of French news on radio in Ireland, South Africa and New Zealand.
Recently, Elaine completed a psychology research thesis on frontline journalists’ attitudes to seeking help for trauma-related stress. This area of interest also comes in to her work as a journalism trainer, both of experienced journalists and students in some of France’s top journalism schools.
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Klas Backholm
Country Contact, Finnish Network
Klas Backholm is a journalism and trauma researcher at the Developmental Psychology Department at Åbo Akademi University in Vaasa, Finland, where he specialises in the psychology of crisis situations. Since the beginning of 2008, Klas has been involved in creating a Dart network in Finland.
Klas is currenlty writing a doctoral dissertation on the psychological well-being of journalists after crisis-related work assignments. Prior to become a lecturer, Klas worked as a news journalist at the Finnish Broadcasting Company.
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Liselotte Englund
Country Contact, Scandinavian Network
Liselotte Englund is a freelance journalist and a lecturer at Karlstad University, who specialises in teaching trauma-related journalism, crisis psychology and science communication. With over twenty of years of experience as a practising journalist, she has run courses for journalists, students and rescue workers.
Liselotte is the former editor-in-chief of Tvärsnitt, a magazine on research in the humanities and social sciences. Prior to that, she worked for Swedish national radio where she had her own show on health and medical issues. In 2008 Liselotte presented her doctoral thesis on trauma journalism, The Eye of the Disaster. A Study of Journalists Work at Accident Scenes and Disaster Sites.
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Milorad Ivanovic
Country Contact, Balkan Network
Milorad Ivanovic is the deputy editor-in-chief of Blic, the largest Serbian daily newspaper. He was previously the paper’s foreign affairs editor and has a special interest in investigative and cross-border journalism. Milorad founded the Media Focus, Center for Investigative Journalism in Serbia and is on the board of SCOOP, a network of investigative journalists working in East and Southeastern Europe.
Milorad has also worked as a correspondent for the the French news agency EPN and has had articles published in such international newspapers as The Sunday Times in the UK, El Mundo in Spain, Der Standard in Austria and the Washington times. Milorad produced Hidden Wounds, a documentary film on post-traumatic stress disorder which was made in co-operation with the BBC. His investigations have included work on human trafficking (in association with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting), the employment of Balkan mercenaries by British and US security firms in Iraq, and arms trafficking from Ukraine into Serbia. In 2007 Milorad was selected for the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence.
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Olga Kravtsova, a psychologist and former Fulbright Scholar in residence at the University of Washington, coordinates Dart Center activities in Russia.
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Trond Idås
Country Contact, Scandinavian Network
Trond Idås is an advisor for the Norwegian Union of Journalists, and is responsible for national courses in safety and trauma training for professional journalists. He lectures in journalism and truama at Oslo University College.
Trond is also a research assistant at the Norwegian Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies, University of Oslo, where he is working on a masters thesis examining trauma-related stress among journalists who covered the 2004 Asian tsunami. He is a former journalist in the business section of Aftenposten, Norway's leading morning newspaper.
University of Tulsa, Oklahoma
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Elana Newman, McFarlin Chair of Psychology at the University of Tulsa, has conducted research on a variety of topics regarding the psychological and physical response to traumatic life events, assessment of PTSD in children and adults, journalism and trauma, and understanding the impact of participating in trauma-related research from the trauma survivor's perspective.
She is a Past President of the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies, the world’s premier organization dedicated to trauma treatment, education, research, public policy concerns and theoretical formulation. Her work in journalism and trauma has focused on occupational health of journalists and she and her students have several studies underway examining the effects of journalistic practice upon consumers. She was the key investigator on the Dart Center's research survey on photojournalists' exposure to trauma. She co-directed the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma’s’ first satellite office in NYC after 9-11
University of Texas, Austin
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Donna DeCesare
Latin America Coordinator and Dart Media Curator
Donna DeCesare is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas School of Journalism, a faculty affiliate of the Latin American Studies program, and an Advisory Board member of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.
A documentary photographer known for her work on youth identity and gang violence, she coordinates the Dart Center's activities throughout Latin America and curates visual journalism for Dart Media.