Meet the 2025 jury

Aiganysh Aidarbekova joined Bellingcat in 2018 as a Central Asian researcher and trainer. She has conducted open source investigations in various fields ranging from flight tracking to corruption, from environment to war research. Her recent works include documenting and mapping destruction of towns in Tajik-Kyrgyz conflict, researching urban floods in Russia and Kazakhstan, and linking neo-nazi groups and anti-immigrant raids in Russia. Aiganysh is currently the lead of Bellingcat’s TechTeam project which specializes in data driven investigations and tool development. Conducting Bellingcat’s workshop, Aiganysh has trained hundreds of journalists and activists around the world on the methods of open source research.

Julia Bayer is an investigative reporter exposing human rights abuses and environmental crimes through open data and satellite imagery. She joined DW’s investigative unit using opensource methods and visual storytelling to uncover wrongdoing and hold power accountable. In her latest investigation, Julia and her team uncovered a transnational human trafficking and online fraud operation in Myanmar, revealing the criminal network behind it. 

Julia has two roles: investigator and innovator. She is an expert in digital verification and synthetic media detection, working with her innovative team at DW’s Research and Cooperation unit to develop tools such as SPOT, Truly Media, InVid, and Digger-Deepfake detection. She also trains media organizations and NGOs worldwide in OSINT techniques and digital verification.

Julia is the founder of @quiztime, a weekly quiz series on Bluesky and X, aimed at strengthening your digital verification and geolocation skills – whether on your own or as a team

Rozina Breen is editor-in-chief and CEO of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ). 

Rozina is an award-winning editor who joined TBIJ from the BBC. She ran the UK’s largest network newsroom outside of London where, as head of news at BBC 5 Live, she oversaw coverage of the EU referendum, the election of Donald Trump, the Grenfell Tower fire and the terror attacks in London and Manchester. She commissioned award-winning podcasts including Brexitcast, You, Me and the Big C, The Sista Collective and Hope High, which went onto win an Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils. Rozina also launched the DigiHub for the BBC World Service, growing BBC News’s digital footprint across the world and My Bradford, a citizen journalism-focused hyperlocal that went onto win a regional press award in its first year. She has a reputation for multi-platform collaboration, innovation and commissioning through a diverse lens.

TBIJ is the UK’s largest non-profit investigative newsroom. It is fierce in its investigative work: shining a light on injustice, exposing wrongdoing and working on behalf of citizens and communities to ensure fairer and better real world outcomes. The Bureau’s world-class, award-winning team has unparalleled knowledge across health, big tech, corruption, inequality, labour rights, the environment and community-led journalism. And unlike most other newsrooms, it is mandated to go beyond the headline in order to spark real world change.

Malachy Browne is a reporter with The New York Times who combines traditional journalism with the analysis of digital and visual evidence in investigations. He has reported on a wide range of topics including Sudan’s civil war, the Israel-Gaza conflict, Russian atrocities in Ukraine and Syria, and police killings of Black Americans. He has led reporting teams whose work received Pulitzer Prizes for International Reporting, duPont-Columbia awards, a Peabody award and several News and Documentary Emmys. Prior to joining The Times, Malachy worked at Storyful, Reported.ly and Village Magazine in Ireland. He is from Broadford, Co. Limerick.

Marie Bohner works on development strategies to support AFP’s global digital investigation team, which takes in more than 150 journalists globally. She accompanies partnerships with the Digital Investigation’s department partners – including major social media platforms, EU institutions, as well as with peer digital investigation and fact-checking organisations in Europe and globally. She is also a member of the European Fact-Checking Standards Network’s Governance Body.

Marie coordinated the award-winning CrossCheck France collaborative project, gathering more than 30 newsrooms and tech partners to tackle disinformation during the French Presidential Election in 2017. She did so on behalf of First Draft, and was their Global Head of Partnerships until 2021. 

Image credit: Amélie Churin/AFP. 

Ross Burley is co-founder and Executive Director of CIR. Ross has over 20 years of experience in international relations, human rights and the media. A former British civil servant, Ross served in the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in London, Washington D.C. and Tel Aviv, and worked with the former deputy Prime Minister as an advisor on international human rights issues. He also worked for several years in the private sector for leading British communications and media organisations, partnering with journalists and civil society actors to design flagship media literacy programmes, including the Open Information Partnership. An experienced open source investigator, Ross has led major investigations into how malign actors, including the Kremlin, have used influence operations to distort democracy.

​Ross has been published in the Washington Post, The Telegraph, International Business Times, Euronews, Politico and Vice News. He holds a BA (Hons) and MSc in Anthropology from Oxford University, where he specialized in visual representations of violence in Northern Ireland.

Brecht Castel (1990) is a Belgian journalist and former fact-checker renowned for his expertise in OSINT. Since 2017, he has been associated with the Belgian magazine Knack, where he specializes in verifying viral images and videos, utilizing OSINT techniques to uncover the truth behind online content. He is passionate about educating others on OSINT methodologies, sharing tutorials and insights on platforms like X and YouTube. He has conducted masterclasses on visual OSINT for both beginners and advanced practitioners, sharing his knowledge and experience. Through his work, Brecht Castel has become a prominent figure in the OSINT community, contributing significantly to the fight against misinformation and the promotion of open source investigative techniques.

Alison Killing is a senior reporter on the Financial Times’s visual investigations team, an interdisciplinary group of journalists harnessing open source techniques, computational tools and traditional reporting to break stories in visual formats.

Before joining the FT, Alison worked with BuzzFeed News, the BBC and Lighthouse Reports. In 2021 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting together with two colleagues for an investigation that uncovered a secret network of prison camps in Xinjiang, China for the mass detention of Muslims. She is a licensed architect.

Reade Levinson is a visual investigations reporter at Reuters News. She specialises in using data analysis and open source methods to break news and expose wrongdoing. She has covered the conflict in Sudan; police violence and failings of the U.S. justice system; business interests of Myanmar military family members; and the largely unregulated trade in donated human bodies. In 2023, she was part of a team at Reuters that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for a series of stories detailing Nigeria military’s campaign of lethal violence carried out over a decade in which they forced thousands of women to undergo abortions after being freed from sexual captivity by Boko Haram rebels and also slaughtered dozens of their living children. She has also won the Selden Ring for Investigative Reporting, Gerald Loeb Award, Scripps Howard Award, Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics and has been a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize, among others.

Jane Lytvynenko is an award-winning freelance reporter specializing in visual and online investigations. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Atlantic, MIT Tech Review, and others. An investigation into Russian theft of Ukrainian grain on occupied territories Jane contributed to at the Journal won the 2023 Gerald Loeb Award. The investigative documentary, “Shadow Men: Inside Wagner, Russia’s Secret War Company,” for which Jane was one of the producers, was a finalist for the 2024 duPont-Columbia Award.Previously, Jane was a senior research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center where she focused on global disinformation trends and building a training curriculum on online investigations for newsrooms. She joined Harvard after working as a senior technology reporter at BuzzFeed News. While at BuzzFeed News, she investigated online disinformation and media manipulation. Jane is currently focused on reporting on Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Milena Marin is the Deputy Director for Digital Investigations, Amnesty International. Milena leads the Evidence Lab, Amnesty International’s digital investigations team, which works to advance digital methods in human rights research.

With a career spanning fifteen years at the intersection of technology, data and social advocacy, Milena has worked to defend human rights, increase public sector transparency, fight corruption and promote open data. Her work includes leading Amnesty Decoders, a pioneering initiative that uses data science, crowdsourcing and artificial intelligence to sift through and analyse large volumes of data for human rights research. Prior to Amnesty International, Milena led the School of Data, a data literacy programme where she trained and mentored activists and journalists to use data for social impact. She has also worked with Transparency International, enabling the organisation’s global network to use technology in the fight against corruption.

Chris Morris is the CEO of Full Fact, the UK’s independent fact checking organisation, which also builds AI tools to help fight misinformation. Previously, he was a foreign correspondent for the BBC for more than 20 years in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the US, before becoming the face and voice of BBC Reality Check.

Simon Ostrovsky is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and a PBS NewsHour Special Correspondent. In 2023 Simon was honored with a Dupont-Columbia Award, a National Press Club Award and a citation from the Overseas Press Club of America for his coverage of Ukraine following Russia’s full-scale invasion. Simon’s 2015 VICE investigation Selfie Soldiers was the first documentary film to rely primarily on open source data. He established the presence of Russian troops in Ukraine at an early stage in the conflict by re-enacting a Russian soldier’s social media posts in various locations around eastern Ukraine and Russia. Selfie Soldiers was credited with getting mainstream news outlets to take open source video journalism seriously for the first time after Columbia University honored it for its “innovative reporting” methods in 2016.

Image credit: Harriet Dedman 2016

Anne Pellegrino manages the Media and Think Tank Program at Planet, facilitating access to satellite imagery and training for journalists and researchers. Prior to Planet, she was a researcher at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) and taught workshops on OSINT tools at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. 

Benjamin Strick is a digital investigator with a background in law, military and technology, specialising in open source intelligence (OSINT), investigations, information warfare, data and maps. ​He has applied these skills to document human rights abuses, war crimes and influence operations across the world working with international media to create multi-award-winning investigative documentaries and assist civil society. He shares his passion for open source investigations through free YouTube tutorials to democratise these skills.

​Ben is the Director of Investigations at the Centre for Information Resilience and was previously an open source investigator with BBC Africa Eye, is a Bellingcat contributor and co-founder of Ocelli Project. In 2021 he was awarded Open Source Intelligence Champion of the Year for investment, commitment and contribution to the field.

​Ben is known for investigating Cameroonian executions, taking down influence operations targeting human rights, working with teams to map Russia’s war on Ukraine, documenting a massacre in Sudan, tracking drones in Libya, documenting destroyed villages in Myanmar, investigating arms exports, identifying deceptive networks in India, investigating human rights abuses in Myanmar and finding John McAfee.

Shayan Sardarizadeh is a senior journalist at BBC Verify who specialises in open source investigations, disinformation, conspiracy theories, content verification, AI and online extremism.

Klaas van Dijken is co-founder and director of Lighthouse Reports. As investigative journalist and editor, his works focuses on atrocity crimes, human rights violations at borders and the involvement of governments and state-funded agencies. Before Lighthouse, Klaas worked as a conflict reporter and investigative journalist in Eastern and Central Africa and Afghanistan. His work has been published worldwide in print, online and TV.