Janine di Giovanni

Janine di Giovanni is Executive Director and CEO of The Reckoning Project, an organization dedicated to documenting war crimes in Ukraine and building cases for prosecution and international mechanisms. She is currently also the Tom and Andi Bernstein Visiting Fellow for Human Rights at Yale Law School, the Schell Center for Human Rights.

Di Giovanni’s human rights work draws on her experiences as an award-winning war correspondent, the author of nine books, and her academic career specializing in human rights, war crimes, and Women, Peace and Security. Previously, she ran a similar initiative for the UN Democracy Fund in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

Currently, di Giovanni is a global affairs columnist at Foreign Policy and The National in Dubai, and a Contributing Editor to Vanity Fair. She is also a nonresident International Security Fellow at the New America Foundation and an Associate Fellow at The Geneva Centre for Security Policy. She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. A French, British and U.S. citizen, she is a Board Member of the Institute of War and Peace Reporting and Association of Foreign Press Correspondents.

From 2021 to 2022, di Giovanni was Visiting Fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s Stavros Niarchos SNF Agora Institute, leading initiatives on transitional justice. She was a Senior Fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs from 2018 to 2022, teaching courses on human rights. Prior to that, she was the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and a Professor of Practice in Human Rights at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. Di Giovanni has won more than a dozen awards for her writing. In 2020, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her its highest non-fiction prize, the Blake-Dodd, for her lifetime body of work.

A graduate of the elite Iowa Writer’s Workshop, di Giovanni received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her non-fiction writing in 2019. She chronicled the disappearance of Christian minorities in her most recent book, "The Vanishing: Faith, Loss, and the Twilight of Christianity in the Land of the Prophets," released in October 2021 and hailed by Salman Rushdie as “a tragic portrait of a disappearing world, created with all of the great Janine di Giovanni’s passion and literary grace.” Di Giovanni’s The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria has been translated into 28 languages, and was a Finalist for the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Prize, having been deemed “searing and necessary” by the New York Times.

During the Arab Spring and the Syrian war, di Giovanni was the Middle East Editor at Newsweek reporting on international security. She was the Senior Foreign Correspondent for The Times of London prior to that, reporting on more than 18 armed conflicts. As a 2016 Pakis Scholar at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, di Giovanni focused on international law. She was a contributing editor for two decades at Vanity Fair, where she won the National Magazine Award for Reporting during the war in Kosovo, along with many other awards.

Di Giovanni’s experience in war zones spans 33 years in the Middle East, the Balkans, and Africa. She has investigated human rights abuses on four continents. She is the subject of two long-format documentaries, including the widely acclaimed 7 Days in Syria and Bearing Witness. Her TED talk, “What I Saw in the War,” has received over one million views on YouTube. In 2016, she was awarded the International Women Media Foundation’s prestigious COURAGE Award. She is a former Ochberg Fellow at Columbia University’s School of Journalism, given in recognition of her work with victims of war trauma.

She is the mother of Luca Girodon, a pre-law student at Yale College.