Team

Abhaya Balaji

Through her photographs, Abhaya understands, questions and relates to the world. Abhaya’s work on communities has been published and exhibited in India, Europe and America. Her work depicts the changing relationship between human life and its environment.

She has been documenting the Indian agrarian crisis and the Baiga forest tribe as a part of an ongoing long-term project. She holds a Master in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography from UAL, with practical experience from Magnum Foundation and Reuters in London.

Abhaya and four other young female photographers co-founded The MILK Collective as a platform to showcase documentary stories with a contemporary woman’s gaze at current global issues. She currently resides in Nagpur, India.

Andre Malerba

Andre is currently based in Bangkok, Thailand, with five years of experience working throughout South/Southeast Asia. He has extensive knowledge of Myanmar in particular, having lived there for over three years.

In this time, Andre has covered everything from daily life to breaking news and extreme humanitarian crises. His work is made with a strong, ethical sensibility that is focused on maintaining the integrity of the people and places he photographs.

Andre’s work has been published internationally in print and online at: Time.com, BBC, Al Jazeera America, Terra Mater, Foreign Policy Magazine, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Global Post, Pro Photographer Magazine, among others.

He has collaborated with various NGOs including the Novartis Foundation, Save The Children International, Natural Resource Governance Institute, Médecins Sans Frontières and WORTH, producing both still images and multimedia projects. Andre has also produced video for clients including Google, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Al Jazeera+, and China Daily Asia.

Andre has co-led photography workshops in Myanmar, in conjunction with the Caravan’s Journal, and has spoken at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

Daniel Hurst

Daniel Hurst is a freelance journalist based in Tokyo, Japan. His reporting interests include climate change, social justice, education and politics. His news and feature articles about Japan and the wider region have been published by international outlets including The Guardian, NBCNews.com, The Times of London, The Diplomat, The Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s The Age.

Before relocating to Japan in 2016, Daniel specialised in Australian politics and public policy. He was a Canberra-based political correspondent for The Guardian’s Australian edition between 2013 and 2016, and before that a politics and education reporter for Fairfax Media titles including The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. It was a tumultuous time in Australian politics, with four prime ministers in as many years, during which Daniel scrutinised a series of budget measures that had big implications for the education system and the social safety net.

He started his journalism career with community newspapers The Redland Times and Bayside Bulletin in his hometown in south-east Queensland, Australia, before moving to the digital-only news service brisbanetimes.com.au, where he launched a “spin check” series to debunk politicians’ claims. He completed a degree in journalism at the Queensland University of Technology in 2007.

Aung Naing Soe

Aung Naing Soe is a freelance photographer and multimedia journalist based in Yangon, Myanmar. He has been working as a local producer since 2012 and photographer since 2013. Aung Naing Soe’s pictures have been published in the TIMES, The New Yorker and The Washington Post. In 2017 while incarcerated for his journalistic work, he won the second prize of the “My Yangon My Home” photo festival.

Jean Chung

Jean Chung is an award-winning photojournalist from South Korea who believes in surviving power of women in dire situations like war. After living in Afghanistan in 2006 and travelling to Africa from 2008 until now, she has been documenting the lives of women who were affected by war such as pregnant mothers and survivors of sexual violence. Her work gained international recognition such as the Grand Prix of CARE Humanitaire Reportage (2007), the Pierre & Alexandra Boulat Award (2008) at Visa pour l’Image in Perpignan; first place of 4^th Days Japan Photojournalism Awards and WHO’s Stop Tuberculosis Partnership Award (2008), and 6^th and 7^th Days Japan Photojournalism Awards (2010 and 2011). She is also in an Ambassador Program for Canon U.K. (2017)

She is currently a contract photographer for Getty Images based in Seoul, South Korea, and is working for international media notably The New York Times, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Stern, Der Spiegel, M -Le magazine du Monde, Time.com, among others. She hopes to tell her visual story and deliver the voices to the world about the women’s side of the history of armed conflict.

Laura Villadiego

Born and raised in Spain, Laura Villadiego is a freelance journalist specialized in human rights, labour issues and the environment. Based in Thailand, she has been covering Southeast Asia since 2009. Her work has been published in international media outlets, such as Al Jazeera, The Guardian or the Spanish News Agency EFE. She has also co-authored two books focused on supply chains.

Nick Axelrod

Nick specialises in documenting the adverse impacts of development on local communities and the environment. He has worked for a number of international humanitarian organizations such as UNICEF, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

His journalistic work has been published in various local and international publications, including The International New York Times and Time Magazine.

Nick has been based in Southeast Asia since 2008 and is a founding member of Ruom. He is currently based in Bangkok, Thailand. He is fluent in English and French.

Nithin Coca

Nithin Coca is a global freelance journalist based part-time in Southeast Asia, Japan, and California, focuses on stories that build connections across borders in regions of the world that does not get enough attention in the English-language media.

Over the past five years, he has covered political, social, environmental, and development issues for publications including Ozy, Engadget, Equal Times, The Diplomat, Shareable, Al Jazeera, Quartz, Ensia, Forbes, and New Internationalist.

Nithin was awarded fellowships from the International Center for Journalists and the Solutions Journalism Network to support his reporting. He has also worked on field investigations with The Changing Markets Foundation and Wild Aid.

Coca received his BA in Communication from the University of Southern California, and a Masters in International Affairs from Columbia University.

Rachel Blundy

Rachel Blundy is a journalist from London, based in Hong Kong. She currently works as a fact-check editor for Agence France-Presse and previously held roles with news agency Storyful and English-language newspaper South China Morning Post. She is skilled in reporting, feature writing, social media, editing, debunking misinformation andonline media production.

Urvashi Sarkar

Urvashi Sarkar is an independent journalist based in India. Her interests include international politics, culture and gender. She was a 2018 fellow with the UN Reham al Farra Memorial Journalism programme and a 2016 fellow with People’s Archive of Rural India. She is a 2018 recipient of the Laadli  Media Awards for gender sensitivity.

Her work has appeared in various publications like Al Jazeera, People’s Archive of Rural India, Caravan Magazine, The Wire, Scroll, The Print, Newslaundry, Newsclick, Himal South Asian and The Hindu. She is currently

Varsha Torgalkar

Varsha Torgalkar is an independent journalist based out of Pune. She covers social justice, gender, climate change and travel for national and international news publications. She has covered agrarian crisis in Marathwada and Vidarbha extensively and interested in rural Journalism. She holds a diploma in Journalism and a Masters in political science from Pune University.

She is an avid trekker and has successfully scaled Everest Base Camp, Annapurna Circuit Trek and Goecha La.

Victoria Milko

Victoria Milko is a freelance multimedia journalist based in Myanmar. Her work focuses on human rights in South and Southeast Asia and can be found in publications such as The Washington Post, Associated Press, NPR, and more.

Viola Gaskell

Viola Gaskell is a multimedia journalist from Hawaii, where she got her start freelancing for the Maui News and generating content for non-profits. Now based in Hong Kong, Viola’s fascination with her new home inspires her to write and photograph her vibrant surrounding, with the aim to capture both the wonderful nuances and hazy contradictions of Hong Kong. Her work has been published around the world on sites like Al Jazeera, South China Morning Post, Hong Kong Free Press, Zolima City Magazine, Rice Media Co. in Singapore, NeoCha in Shanghai, and The Daily Beast and Mashable in the US.

To Viola, photojournalism is the perfect means to ending up in rooms you were never meant to be in — a backdoor to what is off the beaten path and hidden in plain sight. She enjoys delving into cultural and social eccentricities, our interaction with the natural world, adventure, design, the lives of inspiring humans, and more — ready to observe and inquire at length.

Viola holds a bachelor’s degree in multimedia journalism from the Brooks Institute in California and has done additional research in journalism and conservation at Emerson College and the University of Hawaii.

Yewon Kang

Yewon Kang is a freelance journalist based in Seoul, South Korea. Her passion is writing about technology with a feminist perspective.

In the past 7 years, she covered technology and business for publications including IDG News Service, Nikkei Asian Review and The Wall Street Journal. She also worked as a managing editor with Platoon Cultural Development, an art/culture/communications agency based in Seoul and Berlin.

Yewon holds a B.A. in journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an M.S. from Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. In her free time, Yewon enjoys swimming, practising yoga and reading indie magazines.