Director General

Rawan Damen, Director General of ARIJ, has over 25 years of experience in television and journalism. She currently serves as the Chair of the Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD) and is a member of the jury for the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize. Under Rawan’s leadership since 2020, ARIJ has supported more than 300 investigative reports, dozens of which have won prestigious international awards. She launched the first regional network of its kind: the Arab Fact-Checkers Network (AFCN), and the first regional Arab whistleblowers platform, in addition to an AI strategy and ethics framework in Arabic. Her television documentaries and investigative reports have received international acclaim, most notably Al Nakba. She held the position of Senior Commissioning Producer at Al Jazeera Media Network for ten years until 2016. She supervised the production of more than 250 documentary films and TV investigative reports, in addition to the Palestine Remix interactive platform. She received the Media Creativity Award from the Arab Thought Foundation in 2015 and has worked as a media consultant for UNICEF, the International Labour Organization (ILO), and others. She holds a Master’s degree with distinction in Communication Studies from the University of Leeds (2003) and a Bachelor’s degree with distinction in Media and Sociology from Birzeit University (2001).