Janine di Giovanni

Janine di Giovanni (@janinedigi) is a  multi-award winning journalist and author who worked as a war reporter for more than three decades. She heads a war crimes investigative project in Ukraine.

Janine co-founded and is executive director of  The Reckoning Project: Ukraine Testifies (@TRPUkraine), a transitional justice organization established after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The project trains researchers in Ukraine to collect testimonies of war crimes and crimes against humanity according to legal evidentiary standards that can be used in court. Through her work as a conflict journalist, Janine experienced firsthand the frustration when testimonies collected directly from victims are inadmissible in courts. She set up the project to bridge the gap between journalism and justice  in partnership with British writer and academic Peter Pomerantsev and Ukrainian journalist Nataliya Gumenyuk. 

In the fall of 2023 Janine joined the Yale Law School Schell Center for Human Rights as a Tom and Andi Bernstein Visiting Human Rights Fellow. She served as a Senior Fellow and Professor at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs from 2018-2022 where she taught two human rights courses which looked at eight conflicts in depth. She also taught a course at Yale in Reporting War for Humanitarians.

In 2019, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship for her research in the Middle East, and in 2020, she received the American Academy of Arts and Letters highest prize for non-fiction, the Blake Dodd,  for her body of work spanning three decades.  She is a Global Affairs columnist for Foreign Policy Magazine and The National, in Abu Dhabi.

From 2017 to 2018, Janine was the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Professor of Practice in Human Rights at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Administration. She is the author of the award-winning book, The Morning They Came For Us: Dispatches from Syria, which has been translated into 25 languages and was deemed “searing and necessary” by the New York Times. She is  the author of eight other books on war and conflict, most recently The Vanishing, chronicling the disappearance of Christian minorities, published in 2021.

Janine is a former Middle East Editor at Newsweek and was the Senior Foreign Correspondent for the Times of London for many years. As a 2016 Pakis Scholar at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, she focused on international law and international security. She was a contributing editor for two decades at Vanity Fair where she won the National Magazine Award for Reporting among many awards. In 2021 she was awarded the Professional Excellence Award by the Foreign Press Correspondents Association.

Janine has reported widely on war, conflict, and its aftermath  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 1 million views on YouTube.  In 2016, she was awarded the International Women Media Foundation’s prestigious COURAGE Award.

Janine is also non-resident International Security Fellow at the New America Foundation and an Associate Fellow at The Geneva Centre for Security Policy. 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 has won more than 15 major awards for her extensive work in conflict zones and during humanitarian crises in more than 30 countries.

She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.  She carries British, French and American nationalities and lives in France.