Speakers

Andrew W. Lehren is a senior editor on the NBC News investigations team. Previously, he spent almost 13 years as a reporter at The New York Times, working on a range of national, international, and investigative stories including the Wikileaks trove of diplomatic cables, Afghanistan and Iraq war logs, and Guantanamo detainee dossiers. Highlights from those stories were compiled into a bestselling book, “Open Secrets.” He contributed to the Pulitzer Prize-winning series that examined substandard Chinese chemicals tainting U.S. pharmaceuticals. Before joining The Times, he was an investigative producer at NBC News. His work included covering 9/11 and terrorism. He has won numerous awards, including a Polk, Peabody, two duPont-Columbia batons and Edward R. Murrow investigative awards, Emmys, three Investigative Reporters & Editors awards, an Overseas Press Club honor, and a Daniel Pearl investigative award. His investigative reporting class at CUNY has also won the Investigative Reporters & Editors award for best student investigation in the nation. He has written for Reuters, the Philadelphia Daily News, JazzTimes, and The National Law Journal.

Thomas Kent is a specialist on journalistic ethics, the world information war and Russian affairs. He teaches about disinformation at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University in New York. Formerly he was a correspondent and senior editor at The Associated Press, and president and CEO of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, based in Prague. Earlier AP assignments included head of international news, bureau chief in Moscow, chief of AP operations in Tehran during the Iranian revolution, correspondent for the EU in Brussels, and correspondent in Sydney, Australia.

Kent now consults for journalism projects in formerly Soviet countries, and assists news organizations in writing ethics codes. He has served twice as a juror for the Pulitzer Prizes in international reporting and has held board or advisory positions with the Online News Association, the London-based Ethical Journalism Network, the Society of Professional Journalists in the U.S. and the Organization of News Ombudsmen and Standards Editors.

Kent has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Council, The Hill, Center for European Policy Analysis, The American Interest and others.

Raffi Khatchadourian has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2008. He covers a wide range of topics, including science, art, politics, foreign affairs, and national security. His articles have been anthologized in “Best American Sports Writing” and in “Best American Nonrequired Reading.” On two occasions, Khatchadourian’s work was nominated for National Magazine Awards—once for his profile of an al-Qaeda propagandist, titled “Azzam the American,” and a second time in collaboration with a New Yorker multimedia team for “Secrets of Edgewood,” an investigation into Cold War psychochemical experiments. His work has also been short-listed for Overseas Press Club and James Beard Foundation awards and for the Livingston Award.

Matthew Cassel is a documentary filmmaker and multimedia journalist based in the Mediterranean region. In a career spanning more than 15 years, he has documented stories of people facing conflict and persecution in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and beyond. He is currently a correspondent for VICE News, and still continues to work as a one-person video crew filming, producing and editing short and long-form documentary content for various publications. Cassel has been at the forefront of the journalism industry’s pivot to web-based video production, and most of his work has been created exclusively for online publishing.

Since 2020 he has reported for VICE News from Lebanon on the economic crisis, Belarus on unprecedented protests against Alexander Lukashenko, Covid wards stretched to their limit in Belgium, and more than a dozen other countries. In 2021, he was part of the VICE News Tonight team that won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Newscast, and his reporting from Armenia during the war with Azerbaijan was nominated for an Emmy. 

In addition to his native English, Cassel is also fluent in Arabic. His work has been published by VICE, Al Jazeera English, AJ+, The New Yorker, BBC, The New York Times, Arte, The Guardian, NBC News and numerous other outlets.

Ariane Chemin is a French reporter from the daily newspaper Le Monde, where she investigates politics, media, and other topics. In 2022, she visited Ukraine four times and in 2023 published a long investigation on the Ukrainian president, called “The Five Lives of Volodymyr Zelensky.” She is the author of several books, including: “A la recherche de Milan Kundera.”

Rasmus Canbäck is a Swedish journalist and author, specializing in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. His work is predominantly published on the media platform Blankspot, where since after the 2020 Artsakh War he has been writing about the post-war reality in the region as well as investigating a new era of Azerbaijani Caviar Diplomacy. His book, with photos by Areg Balayan, “I Die Slowly Every Day”, is about their trip to Nagorno-Karabakh in March 2021 (published in 2023).

Ilya Lozovsky is a staff writer and senior editor at OCCRP, based in Sarajevo. He writes about corruption and democracy; edits investigations, especially in the organization’s growing Central Asia program; and trains up-and-coming reporters and editors on investigative editing and storytelling. Previously, he was OCCRP’s managing editor. Prior to joining, Ilya edited and wrote for Foreign Policy magazine’s “Democracy Lab” channel in Washington. His work has appeared in Foreign Policy, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Haaretz, and other outlets.

Anneli Ahonen has extensive experience in developing democratic responses to disinformation globally. She has followed Russia’s propaganda on the invasion of Ukraine as an independent expert. Most recently she published a report at Cardiff University on the cyber-enabled influence campaign “Ghostwriter” and the responses to it. Prior to that, she worked at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue as a senior fellow during the German Federal election in 2021 and also served as the Head of East Stratcom Task Force at the European External Action Service. She was leading the team’s work on strategic communications in the Eastern Partnership countries and the EU’s response to Russian disinformation, including running the EUvsDisinfo campaign. Anneli also worked as a journalist for a decade, a good portion of which (2009-2016) she spent working for the biggest Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat in St. Petersburg.

Gaïdz Minassian is a journalist at Le Monde, a doctor in political sciences, lecturer at Sciences Po Paris in International Relations, and an associate expert at CERI-Sciences Po Paris. He is the author of several books in international relations, including his last one, “Les sentiers de la victoire. Peut-on encore gagner une guerre?”

Arevik Sahakyan has almost two decades of experience working as a journalist, commentator and editor in Armenia. She is the Executive Director and Program Manager of Factor TV and served as Editor-in-Chief from 2017-2020. Prior to that she was a political commentator and editor of a news program on 1in.am, a host at A1+TV, a journalist at Aravot Daily and has also worked as a media consultant and manager.

Dr. Karena Avedissian is a political scientist focused on social movements, new media, civil society, and security in the former Soviet Union, with an area focus on Russia and the Caucasus. She received her PhD from the University of Birmingham in 2015. Since then, she has worked as Research Fellow at the University of Southern California and the University of Birmingham on topics of comparative democracy and authoritarianism, state-building in Armenia, and state influence in the post-Soviet space. Her writing has been published in The Guardian, the Moscow Times, Open Democracy, Global Voices, Transitions Online, and Hetq.

Vigen Galstyan is an art historian, curator and lecturer specializing in photography, film and Armenian art of the modern era. He is the director of the Film Heritage Department at the National Film Centre of Armenia and the Head of Exhibitions at the History Museum of Armenia. Vigen holds an MA in Art Curatorship and completed his PhD dissertation on nineteenth-century Armenian historiographic photography at the University of Sydney. He has curated over twenty exhibitions and authored numerous essays dealing with the history of Armenian art, photography and design. Vigen is also the editor of EVN Report’s Et Cetera section.

Vahe Sarukhanyan is a journalist and head of fact-checking at Hetq. He graduated from Yerevan State University’s Faculty of Journalism and has worked as a correspondent for the Hayastani Hanrapetutyun, Martik, the official newspaper of the Artsakh Defense Army. He has worked in joint investigations of property and companies of Armenian officials together with foreign partners (particularly Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Ukraine). His investigations have been published not only in Hetq but also in the OCCRP (Organized Crime Corruption Project).

Vahe has participated in various trainings in Yerevan, Tbilisi, and Berlin and in several conferences organized by the Global Investigative Reporting Network (GIJN), as well as press conferences in Ukraine and Estonia, where he presented the Armenian experience of investigative journalism.

Davit Alaverdyan is a media manager with 30 years of professional experience in journalism, public relations and communications. He began his career in 1991 as a journalist at National TV and Radio of Armenia and later as a journalist and editor in different media organizations. Since 1999, he has been serving as Chief Editor of Mediamax Media Company. He is Associate Professor of journalism at Yerevan State University. Since 2004, he has served as chair of the Armenian Online Media and Reporters Association NGO; he is the Deputy Director of the Information Centre on NATO in Armenia (since 2007) and National Coordinator of EU OPEN Neighborhood East project (since 2015).

Leigha Schjelderup is a writer and analyst interested in exploring the social implications of technological change. After completing a Bachelor’s in International Relations from the University of British Columbia, she relocated to Yerevan in 2019 and has since been immersed in Armenia’s dynamic startup and innovation ecosystem. Currently pursuing a Master’s of Technology Governance and Sustainability at Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia, her studies are centered on how emerging technologies and governance models can be harnessed to address global challenges and promote sustainable development. She aims to engage policymakers, entrepreneurs, scientists and civil society actors in conversations about how to navigate this transition to benefit Armenian society as a whole.