Janine di Giovanni Keynote Speaker

Janine di Giovanni is the Executive Director and CEO of The Reckoning Project (TRP), dedicated to documenting war crimes in Ukraine and building cases for prosecution. With over 30 years of experience reporting from conflict zones, including the Middle East, the Balkans, and Africa, she has investigated human rights abuses on four continents.

Di Giovanni is currently the Tom and Andi Bernstein Visiting Fellow for Human Rights at Yale Law School. Previously, she led transitional justice initiatives for the UN Democracy Fund in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. She has taught human rights and international law at Yale, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins University and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

An award-winning author of nine books, her most recent, The Vanishing: Faith, Loss, and the Twilight of Christianity in the Land of the Prophets, was hailed by Salman Rushdie as “a tragic portrait…created with passion and literary grace.” Di Giovanni’s writing has earned numerous accolades, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Blake-Dodd Prize in 2020 for her lifetime body of work.

A former Middle East Editor at Newsweek and contributing editor at Vanity Fair, she has won the National Magazine Award for Reporting and the International Women’s Media Foundation’s COURAGE Award. Her TED Talk, “What I Saw in the War,” has over one million views. Di Giovanni’s work bridges journalism, academia, and human rights advocacy, cementing her as a leading voice on war crimes and accountability.