Speaker Bios

Hannah Allam covers extremism, political violence and other national security issues as an investigative reporter at ProPublica. She joined in January 2025 from The Washington Post, where she covered similar issues and was part of two Pulitzer-winning teams. Before that, she launched an extremism beat at NPR and reported live from the U.S. Capitol during the attack on Jan. 6, 2021.

As a longtime foreign correspondent for McClatchy, Allam served as bureau chief in Baghdad during the Iraq War and in Cairo during the Arab Spring rebellions. Her work in the Middle East was recognized by the George Polk Awards and the Overseas Press Club. She returned to the United States in 2012 and has reported extensively on U.S. foreign policy, race and religion, and the mainstreaming of extremist ideologies.

Allam is a 1999 graduate of the University of Oklahoma, where she was editor of the OU Daily student newspaper. She was a 2009 Nieman fellow at Harvard and serves on the board of the International Women’s Media Foundation. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Tyrone Beason is a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times’ environment, climate, health and science team whose work includes reporting on Indigenous land issues. He joined the Times as a staff reporter in 2019 to cover the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign. Using narrative writing, scripted essays and visual storytelling, he examined the ways that race shapes the nation’s politics, and after the election, he traveled the country in search of a meaningful racial reckoning in the series “My Country.” Beason previously spent 23 years at The Seattle Times, where he was a columnist, Sunday magazine writer, member of the features staff and business reporter. In 2023, he won a Sigma Delta Chi Award for excellence in journalism from the Society of Professional Journalists for his reporting on inequality in society, and he appeared in the documentary “Racist Trees,” a about segregation in Palm Springs, California. Additionally, a video report he co-produced about racism in an Iowa town earned a 2021 L.A.-area Emmy nomination.

Jonathan Gaston-Falk is an education law attorney with broad experience representing both school district and student clients. Gaston-Falk was a high school student journalist for the inaugural class of contributors for the York High School newspaper The Talon in Yorktown, Virginia. He subsequently earned a bachelor’sdegree from the University of Virginia and a Juris Doctor and Master of Urban Planning from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Gaston-Falk joined the Student Press Law Center (SPLC) as a staff attorney in March 2022 following a five-year tenure with the Legal Aid Society of Rochester, New York, as program director of the Education Law Unit, during which time he advocated for the free speech rights of students before countless boards of education and the Commissioner of Education in Albany.

Sophie Culpepper is a staff writer at Nieman Lab covering local news. She previously co-founded the hyperlocal Lexington Observer, where she reported on public schools, local government, economic development, and public safety among other topics as the digital news nonprofit’s only full-time journalist for two years. She is a proud alum of and forever believer in student journalism, and was a managing editor at her independent college newspaper, The Brown Daily Herald.

David M. Herszenhorn is the Russia, Ukraine, East Europe editor at The Washington Post, where he has overseen coverage of the war in Ukraine and of wartime Russia. He joined the Post in 2022 after six years as chief Brussels correspondent and associate editor at Politico Europe, where he led coverage of the EU, NATO, transatlantic relations, Brexit, Europe’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and the outset of the war. Herszenhorn previously worked at The New York Times as an international correspondent based in Moscow, Congressional correspondent in Washington, and metro reporter in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. He is the author of “The Dissident: Alexey Navalny, Profile of a Political Prisoner.”

Robert Libetti is a filmmaker and journalist. He’s currently an executive producer for The Wall Street Journal, where he leads video investigations and documentaries. He and his team have reported on everything from the Wagner Group and the war in Ukraine to Tesla autopilot crashes, the January 6th Capitol riot and TikTok’s algorithm. Their documentary about the Wagner Group was released two weeks before the group’s failed insurrection and revealed 64 companies that Wagner and its founder Yevgeny Prigozhin used to funnel money to and from the Kremlin. The U.S. Treasury sanctioned companies identified in the film just days after the attempted coup. Libetti and his team were also the first to reveal how the Proud Boys led and instigated the January 6th attacks on the U.S. Capitol in 2021. Many of the individuals they identified, just weeks after the attack, have now been convicted of seditious conspiracy. Libetti’s work has been nominated for several Emmys, a duPont-Columbia Award and a Peabody. He has won two Loeb Awards and was part of a team that won the IRE Philip Meyer Award for Investigative Journalism. He previously worked as a senior video journalist at the Journal, a senior video producer for Business Insider and a video journalist for FiOs1 News.

Ann Marie Lipinski, NF ’90, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. She oversees an international fellowship program and an innovative group of publications about journalism, including Nieman Lab, Nieman Reports and Nieman Storyboard. Before coming to Harvard, Lipinski served as senior lecturer and vice president for civic engagement at the University of Chicago. Prior to that, she was the editor-in-chief and senior vice president of the Chicago Tribune, a post she held for nearly eight years following assignments as managing editor, metropolitan editor and investigations editor. As a reporter at the Tribune, Lipinski was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism for stories she wrote with two other reporters on government corruption in Chicago. While editor of the paper, she oversaw work that won Pulitzers in international reporting, feature writing, editorial writing, investigative reporting and explanatory journalism. Lipinski is a trustee of The Poynter Institute for Media Studies and a past co-chair of the Pulitzer Prize board. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Sandrine Rigaud is a French investigative journalist and filmmaker who most recently served as editor-in-chief of Forbidden Stories, a global network of journalists  pursuing the work of silenced journalists. Since 2019, she has coordinated many cross-border investigations including “The Pegasus Project,” an international project that revealed how governments spied on journalists, opposition politicians, activists, lawyers and others using Pegasus spyware developed by the Israeli NSO Group, and “The Cartel Project,” in which reporters around the world continued the work of slain Mexican journalists. The investigations she has led have won multiple honors including George Polk awards, the Maria Moors Cabot Prize and the Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize. She is the co-author of “Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy” and has directed feature-length investigative documentaries for French television.

Matt Shearer is a reporter for WBZ NewsRadio in Boston, where he focuses on feature stories about people and places in Massachusetts. A lifelong resident of the Commonwealth, he shares his reports across social media platforms and was named “New England's most viral journalist” by The Boston Globe. Shearer has almost 90,000 followers on Instagram alone. His unique approach to social media storytelling has earned him a National Edward R Murrow Award for “Excellence in Innovation,” two “Best of Boston” titles by Boston Magazine, as well as international press coverage from outlets ranging from Bloomberg to People magazine. He previously worked as executive producer for “The TJ Show” on 103.3 Amp Radio (WODS-FM) and “The Jim & Margery Show” on 96.9 Boston Talks (WTKK-FM). He is a graduate of Emerson College. 

Mike Shum is an American filmmaker of Chinese descent who works with a variety of news outlets, including as a director, producer and cinematographer for “PBS Frontline.” He began his career covering stories ranging from the fall of Tripoli in Libya to the M23 rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo. His 2014 collaboration with The New York Times on an ISIS massacre in Iraq garnered him his first News and Documentary Emmy nomination for Outstanding Interview. In 2017, he ventured into investigative journalism documenting accountability in the Indian Health Service (“Predator on the Reservation”), the COVID-19 pandemic and the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. In 2023, he received the National Association of Black Journalists’ Salute to Excellence Award for his feature directorial debut, “Police on Trial.”

Line Vaaben is an editor and immersive journalist at the Danish daily newspaper Politiken, where she leads projects with other reporters, editors, and visual staffers. She holds the unique title of existential editor and produces reports on what it is like being human. In 2019 she wrote the leading Danish textbook on narrative journalism and she teaches the craft of storytelling to students and colleagues. She previously worked for several national Danish newspapers including Dagbladet Information and Kristeligt Dagblad. In 2022, she published “En forudsigelig forbrydelse” (“A Predictable Crime”), a book about hundreds of femicides in Denmark. Her honors include the 2022 Danish Publicist Prize and the 2023 Jyllands-Posten’s Award for nonfiction. She was an Ochberg Fellow in 2023 and a senior fellow in 2024 at The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University.