Janinedi Giovanni

Janine di Giovanni is an award winning war correspondent, author and human rights advocate, widely regarded as one of the most accomplished foreign correspondents of her generation. She is the Executive Director and CEO of The Reckoning Project, a transnational war crimes documentation initiative she co-founded in 2022. The project trains and supports local investigators in Ukraine, Syria, Gaza, and Darfur to collect legally admissible testimony and evidence of atrocity crimes.

She was previously a Senior Fellow at Yale University's Jackson School of Global Affairs, the Tom & Andi Bernstein Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School's Schell Center for Human Rights, and prior to that a Fellow at John Hopkins Stavros Niarchos Agora Institute. She holds a life membership at the Council on Foreign Relations, where she was an Edward R. Murrow Fellow. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction in 2019 to research the war crimes of the Islamic State.

Over a career spanning more than three decades, di Giovanni has reported from nearly every major conflict zone of our time: the siege of Sarajevo and conflicts throughout the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, South Sudan, Yemen, and Ukraine—a total of 18 conflicts and 3 genocides. Her eyewitness reporting has appeared in The Times (London), The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Newsweek, Foreign Policy, The New York Review of Books, Harpers and, among others. From 2013 to 2018, she served as Middle East Editor at Newsweek. Her work is widely anthologized.

She is the author of nine books, including the widely acclaimed The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria (2016), and The Vanishing: Faith, Loss, and the Twilight of Christianity in the Land of the Prophets (2021). The rights of her life was bought by the actress Julia Roberts and she has served as the inspiration for novels, films and documentaris about women war reporters.

Her work has garnered widespread critical acclaim: the British Review of Journalism described it as "established, accomplished brilliance," while The Daily Telegraph called her "the finest foreign correspondent of our generation." The New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani wrote: "Ms. di Giovanni writes here with urgency and anguish—determined to testify to what she has witnessed because she wants people never to forget."

Janine di Giovanni's reporting has not only informed the public—it has shaped the pursuit of justice. Through The Reckoning Project, she has helped pioneer a model for documenting war crimes that is rooted in both trauma-informed interviewing and international legal standards. Her work directly supports prosecutions by Ukrainian courts and international mechanisms, including the International Criminal Court. She has advised the United Nations, NATO, and the European Union on issues related to conflict and transitional justice, and has played a vital role in elevating the importance of survivor testimony.

She is a frequent lecturer on international law, war crimes and accountability on CNN, BBC, NPR, France 24, and other global outlets. She has spoken at the World Economic Forum, the Munich Security Conference, and numerous international justice and peace-building summits. She is a French-British and American multinational.