2022 Dart Award Final Judging Committee
The final judging committee selected two Dart Award winners and three honorable mentions.
Prior to joining Fault Lines, Al-Arian worked as a news producer for Al Jazeera English, covering everything from Guantanamo Bay’s youngest detainee to the resettlement of Iraqi refugees in the US. She received a BA in English literature from Georgetown University and an M.S. from Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. Her work has appeared in The Nation, the New York Times, Salon, The Independent, and other publications. She is co-author of the book Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians.
In addition to her work as a journalist, for 14 years Sam served as the managing editor for the Peabody Award winning website, Transom.org which gives people the tools and inspiration to make their own radio stories. She also oversaw admissions and scholarships for Transom’s on-the-ground workshops.
Prior to her career in radio, Sam worked with young people in mentoring and after school programs and at an alternative public school in Providence, RI.
Bruder is also the author of Burning Book and, with co-author Dale Maharidge, Snowden’s Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance. Bruder has been teaching narrative storytelling at Columbia Journalism School and contributing to The New York Times for more than a decade. She has also written for New York Magazine, WIRED, Harper's Magazine, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The International Herald Tribune, The New York Times Magazine and The Guardian. She was a staff reporter at The Oregonian.
She has a B.A. in English and French from Amherst College and an M.S. in magazine writing from Columbia Journalism School. Support for Bruder’s work has come from fellowships at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, Logan Nonfiction Program, MacDowell and Yaddo.
Reinvestigating Rape, a series with reporter Leila Atassi, led to the testing of nearly 14,000 rape kits and investigations that resulted in indictments in more than 800 cold cases in Cleveland. Researchers built on the project’s early discoveries to redefine the understanding of serial rape in Ohio and beyond. Toxic Neglect, a series with colleague Brie Zeltner, exposed Cleveland’s poor track record for investigating when children were lead poisoned. The series sparked a community wide effort to proactively protect children from the toxin, including a grassroots citizen petition drive and the formation of a coalition of more than 300 public, private and philanthropic partners who worked to pass a law that requires all rental homes in the city to be inspected for lead hazards.
Dissell is a two-time winner of the Dart Award. Case Closed, her series with Andrea Simakis, explored the systemic failures of Cleveland police through the experience of a woman who had to solve her own rape won the award in 2020. Her series, Johanna: Facing Forward, won the 2008 Dart Award. Dissell was a 2016 Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma Ochberg Fellow and has received training in the neurobiology of trauma and trauma-informed interviewing and storytelling techniques and ethics. Dissell has led and participated in multidisciplanary trainings for law enforcement, nurses and advocates and community groups for End Violence Against Women International and the National Center for Victims of Crime. She also has taught emerging journalists at her alma mater, Kent State University.
Before becoming a freelancer in 2002, Palmer served in a number of staff positions: Beijing bureau chief for U.S. News & World Report, staff writer at Fortune, and on-air correspondent at CNN. He began his career as a fact-checker for The Village Voice. In 2008, Palmer was awarded a Ford Foundation grant for Full Disclosure, a video documentary about his three media embeds in Iraq with U.S. Marines.
Palmer is currently the Joan Konner Visiting Professor of Journalism at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He earned his bachelor's in East Asian studies from Brown University and his master's in photography from the School of Visual Arts.
Sijbrandij is the incoming-president-elect of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.