Reza Aslan is a renowned writer, commentator, professor, Emmy- and Peabody-nominated producer, and scholar of religions. A recipient of the prestigious James Joyce award, Aslan is the author of three internationally best-selling books, including the #1 New York Times Bestseller, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. His producing credits include the acclaimed HBO series The Leftovers and the CBS comedy United States of Al. He is the host and Executive Producer of CNN’s Believer and Rough Draft With Reza Aslan, as well as co-host along with Rainn Wilson of the podcast Metaphysical Milkshake. His latest book is An American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville.

Franklin Leonard is the founder of The Black List, a yearly survey highlighting Hollywood’s most popular unproduced screenplays, and the company created to continue its mission. More than 400 Black List scripts have been produced as feature films, earning more than 275 Academy Award nominations and 50 wins. Franklin has worked in development at Universal Pictures and the production companies of Will Smith, Sydney Pollack, Anthony Minghella, Leonardo DiCaprio, and John Goldwyn. He has been a juror at the Sundance, Toronto, and Guanajuato Film Festivals and for the PEN Center USA Literary Awards. He serves on the advisory boards of the Young Storytellers Foundation and the Bernard Van Leer Foundation. He has been named one of The Hollywood Reporter’s "35 Under 35," Black Enterprise Magazine’s 40 Emerging Leaders for Our Future," The Root’s "100 Most Influential African-Americans," and Fast Company’s "100 Most Creative People in Business." He was awarded the 2015 African-American Film Critics Association’s Special Achievement Award for career excellence. He is a graduate of Harvard University and was inducted into the Academy of Motion Picture, Arts, and Sciences in 2016.

Jean Guerrero is a columnist at the Los Angeles Times. She is the author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda. Her first book, Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir, won a PEN Literary Award and was named one of NPR's Best Books of 2019. Her writing is featured in Vanity Fair, Politico, The Nation, Wired, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Best American Essays 2019 by Rebecca Solnit and more. She won the 2022 "Best Commentary" award from the Sacramento Press Club. While working at KPBS as an investigative border reporter, she won an Emmy and contributed to NPR, the PBS NewsHour, and more. Months before Trump’s family separations captured national attention, her PBS reporting on the practice was cited by members of Congress. She started her career at The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires as a foreign correspondent in Mexico and Central America. She was named one of the California Chicano News Media Association’s most influential Latina journalists.

Joel Simon is an author, journalist, and press freedom advocate. He is currently aFellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute, also at Columbia. He is the author of four books, including The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free, coming on April 26 from Columbia Global Reports. From 2006 until 2021, Joel served as executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady are the co-directors of Jesus Camp (Academy Award nominee), The Boys of Baraka (Emmy nominee), 12th & Delaware (Peabody Award winner), Detropia (Emmy winner), Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You (2016 Sundance), One of Us (2017 Toronto International Film Festival), and Love Fraud (2020 Sundance). Endangered (HBO) is Ewing and Grady’s 6th feature documentary collaboration and will be premiering at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival before airing on HBO on June 28.

David Kaye is a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression (2014-2020). His 2019 book, Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet (Columbia Global Reports), explores the ways in which companies, governments, and activists struggle to define the rules for online expression.

Joel Simon is an author, journalist, and press freedom advocate. He is currently a Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute, also at Columbia. He is the author of four books, including The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free, coming on April 26 from Columbia Global Reports. From 2006 until 2021, Joel served as executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady are the co-directors of Jesus Camp (Academy Award nominee), The Boys of Baraka (Emmy nominee), 12th & Delaware (Peabody Award winner), Detropia (Emmy winner), Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You (2016 Sundance), One of Us (2017 Toronto International Film Festival), and Love Fraud (2020 Sundance). Endangered (HBO) is Ewing and Grady’s 6th feature documentary collaboration and will be premiering at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival before airing on HBO on June 28.

David Kaye is a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression (2014-2020). His 2019 book, Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet (Columbia Global Reports), explores the ways in which companies, governments, and activists struggle to define the rules for online expression.

Joel Simon is an author, journalist, and press freedom advocate. He is currently a Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute, also at Columbia. He is the author of four books, including The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free, coming on April 26 from Columbia Global Reports. From 2006 until 2021, Joel served as executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady are the co-directors of Jesus Camp (Academy Award nominee), The Boys of Baraka (Emmy nominee), 12th & Delaware (Peabody Award winner), Detropia (Emmy winner), Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You (2016 Sundance), One of Us (2017 Toronto International Film Festival), and Love Fraud (2020 Sundance). Endangered (HBO) is Ewing and Grady’s 6th feature documentary collaboration and will be premiering at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival before airing on HBO on June 28.

David Kaye is a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression (2014-2020). His 2019 book, Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet (Columbia Global Reports), explores the ways in which companies, governments, and activists struggle to define the rules for online expression.

Jelani Cobb is a historian, and a professor of journalism at Columbia University. A staff writer at The New Yorker since 2015, he is a recipient of the Sidney Hillman Award for Opinion and Analysis, as well as fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the Fulbright Foundation. He lives in New York City.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault is an acclaimed journalist with more than fifty years’ experience working as a correspondent and contributor for NBC, PBS, NPR, CNN, the New York Times, The New Yorker, and other outlets. She is the author of four nonfiction books, as well as the upcoming My People, which will be published in 2022 by HarperCollins. For her contributions to journalism, Hunter-Gault has earned two National News and Documentary Emmy Awards, two Peabody Awards, and the Black Enterprise Legacy Award, among other honors.

Michele Bratcher Goodwin is a Professor at the University of California, Irvine, and founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy. She is also faculty in the Gender and Sexuality Studies Department as well as the Program in Public Health. Professor Goodwin’s scholarship is hailed as “exceptional” in the New England Journal of Medicine. She has been featured in Forbes, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times and her scholarship is published or forthcoming in The Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, and Northwestern Law Review, among others.Trained in sociology and anthropology, she has conducted field research in Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, focusing on trafficking in the human body for marriage, sex, organs, and other biologics. In addition to her work on reproductive health, rights, and justice, Professor Goodwin is credited with forging new ways of thinking in organ transplant policy and assisted reproductive technologies, resulting in works such as Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Body Parts (2006) and Baby Markets: Money and the Politics of Creating Families (2010). She serves on the executive committee and national board of the American Civil Liberties Union. She is a highly sought-after voice on civil liberties, civil rights, reproductive rights and justice, and cultural politics.

Ruth Colker is one of the leading scholars in the country in the areas of Constitutional Law and Disability Discrimination. She is the author of 16 books, two of which have won book prizes. She has also published more than 50 articles in law journals such as the Boston University Law Review, Columbia Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Michigan Law Journal, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the University of Virginia Law Review, and Yale Law Journal.

Jasmine E. Harris is a Professor of Law and Martin Luther King, Jr. Hall Research Scholar at the University of California—Davis School of Law. Professor Harris is an expert in disability law, antidiscrimination law, and evidence. She is a law and equality scholar with a particular focus on disability. Professor Harris combines approaches in law and the humanities to understand better the role that perception, aesthetics, and emotions play in group subordination. By accounting for aesthetic preferences, she argues, we can better design antidiscrimination laws to address structural biases and develop novel remedial pathways. Professor Harris’s recent articles have or will appear in such publications as the Columbia Law Review, New York University Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review (print and online), Yale Law Journal Forum, Cornell Law Review Online, American Journal of Law and Medicine, and the Journal of Legal Education.

Sewell Chan oversees the editorial board and the Op-Ed and Sunday Opinion pages of the Los Angeles Times. He was named to the position in April 2020. Chan previously served as a deputy managing editor, overseeing foreign and national news coverage; the front page; the Data and Graphics Department; the multiplatform copy desks; newsletters; and the editorial library. Before joining The Times in September 2018, Chan worked for 14 years at the New York Times, where he was a metro reporter, Washington correspondent, deputy Op-Ed editor, and international news editor. A native New Yorker, Chan grew up in an immigrant family and was the first in his family to finish college. He graduated from Harvard with a degree in social studies and received a master’s degree in politics from Oxford, where he studied on a British Marshall scholarship.

Brooke Gladstone is the host and managing editor of NPR’s On the Media. She was NPR’s Moscow-based news reporter, later becoming its first media reporter, senior editor of NPR’s All Things Considered, and the senior editor of Weekend Edition with Scott Simon. Gladstone is the recipient of two Peabody Awards, a National Press Club Award, and an Overseas Press Club Award. Gladstone wrote The Influencing Machine, a nonfiction graphic novel illustrated by Josh Neufeld and others in 2011. Gladstone describes the book as "a treatise on the relationship between us and the news media," further described by Leon Neyfakh as "a manifesto on the role of the press in American history as told through a cartoon version of herself.

Yamiche Alcindor is an American journalist who is the PBS NewsHour White House correspondent and a political contributor to NBC News and MSNBC. In the past, she has worked as a reporter for USA Today, The New York Times, and Newsday. Alcindor writes mainly about politics and social issues.

Hector Amaya is a professor of communication and Director of USC’s Annenberg School of Communication. He has authored three books and has published dozens of articles on the issues of globalization, Latin American media, comparative media studies, immigration, and Latinx media studies. His most recent work, Trafficking: Narcoculture in Mexico and the United States (Duke University Press), analyzes the way Mexico’s criminal drug violence and new media technologies structure publicness in Mexico and the United States. His previous book, Citizenship Excess: Latinas/os, Media and the Nation (NYU Press), examines the mainstreaming after 9/11 of anti-Latino nativism in politics and in media. His first book, Screening Cuba: Film Criticism as Political Performance During the Cold War (University of Illinois Press), is a comparative study of film reception of Cuban film, cultural criticism, and citizenship in Cuba and the USA from the 1960s to 1985.

Andrea Bernstein, who won a Peabody award for her work uncovering abuses of power in the Bridgegate scandal, is the author of American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power and the co-host of the Trump, Inc. podcast from WNYC and ProPublica.

Kristen Muller, as Southern California Public Radio’s Chief Content Officer, oversees the station’s programming, podcasting, and excellent local journalism. She leads an award-winning team of hosts, reporters, producers, and editors who are dedicated to informing, entertaining, and connecting the diverse communities of LA.

Joel Simon has been the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) since 2006. Simon has led the organization through a period of expansion, helping to launch the Global Campaign Against Impunity, establishing a Journalist Assistance program and an Emergencies Department, and spearheading CPJ’s defense of press freedom in the digital space through the creation of a dedicated Technology Program. Simon has participated in CPJ missions around the world, from Argentina to Zimbabwe. He has written widely on press freedom issues for publications including Slate, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, World Policy Journal, Asahi Shimbun, and The Times of India. He is a regular columnist for Columbia Journalism Review.  He is the author of the three books, Endangered Mexico (Sierra Club Books, 1997); The New Censorship (Columbia University Press, 2015); and We Want to Negotiate: Inside the Secret World of Kidnapping, Hostages, and Ransom (Columbia Global Reports, January 2019).

Federico Motka is based in London and is the co-founder of the social enterprise FieldWorks. In 2013, when serving as an aid worker at a Syrian refugee camp, Motka was kidnapped and held captive over a nine-month period. This is the first time Motka has spoken publicly about his time in captivity.

Sewell Chan is an American journalist who currently serves as a deputy managing editor at the Los Angeles Times. From 2004 to 2018, he worked at The New York Times in a variety of reporter and editorial positions—most recently as the international news editor in the London office and before then as the deputy editor of the Op-Ed and Sunday sections. Chan was previously a staff writer at The Washington Post and has written for The Wall Street Journal and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Gerard Ryle is ICIJ's director. He led the worldwide teams of journalists working on the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers investigations, the biggest in journalism history. Under his leadership over the past seven years, ICIJ has become one of the best-known journalism brands in the world. Reporters Without Borders has described Ryle’s work with ICIJ as "the future of investigative journalism worldwide" when naming him as one of "100 information heroes" of worldwide significance. Before joining as ICIJ’s first non-American director in September 2011, Ryle spent more than 20 years working as an investigative reporter and editor in Australia. His work as a journalist began in his native Ireland. He was later a Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan, and in 2013 he accepted an honorary doctorate from the University of Liege, on behalf of ICIJ. Ryle is a book author and TED speaker, and he has won or shared in more than 50 journalism awards from seven different countries, including the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, three George Polk Awards, and honors from the Society of Professional Journalists, Overseas Press Club of America, the New York Press Club, the Barlett and Steele Awards, Investigative Reporters and Editors, and Harvard University. He and his ICIJ colleagues also shared an Emmy Award with the U.S. television program 60 Minutes.

Joel Simon has been the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists since 2006. Simon has led the organization through a period of expansion, helping to launch the Global Campaign Against Impunity, establishing a Journalist Assistance program, and spearheading CPJ's defense of press freedom in the digital space through the creation of a dedicated Technology Program. Under his leadership, CPJ has been honored with the Thomas J. Dodd Prize in International Justice and Human Rights and a News & Documentary Emmy for its work in defense of press freedom, and numerous other awards. Simon has written widely on press freedom issues for publications including Slate, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, World Policy Journal, Asahi Shimbun, and The Times of India. His analysis of press freedom issues is featured regularly in major media. He is a regular columnist for Columbia Journalism Review. Prior to joining CPJ in 1997 as Americas program coordinator, Simon worked for a decade as a freelance journalist in Latin America. He covered the Guatemalan civil war, the Zapatista uprising in Southern Mexico, the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the economic turmoil in Cuba following the collapse of the Soviet Union. A graduate of Amherst College and Stanford University, he is the author of Endangered Mexico: An Environment on the Edge (Sierra Club Books, 1997) and The New Censorship: Inside the Global Battle for Media Freedom (Columbia University Press 2015).

Alex Cohen was formerly the local host of Morning Edition, NPR’s most popular show. Prior to that, she was co-host of KPCC’s Take Two and All Things Considered. Currently, Cohen has joined Spectrum News as one of its morning anchors and to host a prime-time evening public affairs program.