Internet Freedom Festival Alumni
These are just some of the many wonderful former fellows that made each edition of the IFF possible. Our alumni network includes community leaders, builders, and technology experts from a diverse cross-section of disciplines and regions. The profiles featured here are those who have consented to be included.
Featured 2020 Alumni
Sunhee
Education, Community Development, Project Management, and Public Policy Research
Sunhee is a researcher and educator passionate about community engagement for digital human rights. She is currently part of a capacity building program team to enhance digital security for local human rights defenders and organizations in East Asia. She is interested in promoting digital ethics and human rights.
Jorge Luis Sierra
Cybersecurity and Community Development
Jorge Luis Sierra is Co-founder and President of the Border Center for Journalists and Bloggers, a non-profit organization based in Edinburg Texas. He is leading the Mexico Investigative Reporting Border Hub project to produce data-driven stories on corruption issues at both sides of the U.S. – Mexico border. As an investigative reporter and editor, Jorge Luis focuses on the intersection of technology, investigative journalism, and cybersecurity.
Yosr
Artificial Intelligence, Digital Rights in the MENA Region
Yosr is a software engineer and digital rights researcher. Her recent work focuses on researching the human rights implications of Artificial Intelligence development in Africa and the Middle East.
Dhiren Borisa
Education and Community Building
Dalit-Queer activist, scholar and poet, Dhiren is an urban social geographer working in the field of queer geographies focussing upon marginalisations on the ais of caste and queerness. He currently teaches Gender and Society at Jindal Global University, Sonepat, India.
Agenonga Robert
Environmental Rights, Human Rights and Holistic Security
Agenonga Robert is an environmental activist and human rights defender. He has deep experience in human rights and environmental justice in the context of Indigenous People’s Rights. Agenonga is currently working with Ngetha Media Association for Peace as a senior researcher and consultant offering digital and physical security guidance, delivering technical support to small and medium local human rights & environmental groups in Africa. He is also involved in the use of information and geospatial technologies to support biodiversity conservation in the Albertine Rift.
Tamara Grigoryeva
Digital Rights and Human Rights across Caucasus, Central Asia, Russia and Turkey
Tamara is a journalist and a human rights defender from Azerbaijan. Tamara is currently based in Washington, DC, where she fights hate speech and disinformation and builds safety mechanisms for the LGBTQI community and journalists. She dedicates her time to other talents and activities like knitting, reading, cooking and aerial dancing.
Featured 2019 Alumni
Colores Mari
Social Communicator, Journalist and Feminist, Specialized in Digital Rights of Rural Communities
Colores Mari works with Ancestra focused in the intersection of narratives and technology to reduce inequality, and the promotion and protection of human rights in Latin America. Colores Mari creates too educational, experimental, and alternative free radio content.
Esther Mwema
Internet Governance, Digital Literacy, Inequality, Safety, Grassroots Organizing
Esther believes in the intersection of humanities and technology. As a creative with a social science background, she has contributed to the internet freedom space as Founder of Digital Grassroots, Safety First for Girls, and as an Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity, among more.
Tamika Blu
Community Participatory, Research on Data and Surveillance
Tamika Blu is a community participatory researcher with the Our Data Bodies Research Project. They are a Mother, alchemist, movement builder, and visionary architect.
Pellaeon Lin
Digital Safety Training and Android Security
Pellaeon loves to code and hack. Their main goal is to code, hack and work towards a free internet.
Arzu Geybulla
Journalist focused in Digital Authoritarianism
Azerbaijani columnist and writer, with special focus in digital authoritarianism and its implications on human rights and press freedom in Azerbaijan. In the past, Arzu has written for Al Jazeera, Eurasianet, Foreign Policy Democracy Lab, CODA, and Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty. She is a contributor at Open Democracy, IWPR, and Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso. She is the recipient of several fellowships and was featured on BBC 100 Women Changemakers in 2014. In 2019, Arzu launched Azerbaijan Internet Watch, a platform that documents, and monitors information controls in Azerbaijan.
Sophina
Kio-Lawson
Digital and Cyber Security
Sophina is a cybersecurity professional who enjoys using her skills for good, protecting lives online through awareness training and through her collaborations with human right organisations. She also co-runs a community for women in cybersecurity called SheSecures.
Featured 2018 Alumni
María Juliana Soto
Communications for Activism
Maria Juliana is journalist, researcher, and creator of content for activism, communication and visual arts projects in relation with technology and human rights like Acoso.Online and Noís Radio. She is the creator of Tour Delirio. Salsa and Surveillance, a transmedia project that seeks to relate our daily lives with the government, corporate and social surveillance with a gender perspective.
Don Le
Research, Advocacy and Communications
Don is a researcher and campaigner, organising international advocacy efforts to promote internet freedom and support frontline activists and citizen journalists. He is currently with ARTICLE 19‘s Digital Team looking into building human rights considerations within technical standards and infrastructure.
Tawanda Mugari
Holistic Security, Organisational Security Audit, Technologist
Tawanda is a Co-founder of Digital Society of Africa (DSA) that works to strengthen the resilience and ability of frontline activists; human rights defenders and other at-risk groups in the region to independently recognize and respond to digital threats and attacks. They seek to achieve this using the holistic security approach; through a range of activities including: organisational security audits; risk assessment; trainings, sustainable security accompaniment; security policy formulation and tech support.
Tom Ritter
Security
Tom Ritter is a distinguished security engineer and recovering consultant now at Mozilla, working on anti-exploitation, Tor, and other new and evolving security features.
Jaume Cardona
Software Development, Digital Security, and Machine Learning
Jaume is software engineer and human rights activist.
Shubha Kayastha
Sexual Rights, Disability and Feminism within the Digital Rights
Shubha is a queer feminist, co-founder of Body & Data which brings intersection of gender and sexuality while working in the digital rights in Nepal. She brings in knowledge and experience working in the issue of sexual rights, disability and gender in her current work in digital rights and internet freedom.
Andreas Reventlow
Independent Journalism, Freedom of Expression, Organizational Development
Andreas is an international development professional focused on making independent media and human rights organisations stronger. He has extensive experience in managing programmes on independent journalism, freedom of expression, media in conflict, and technology and human rights.
Lobsang Gyatso
Digital Security inside Tibet and in the diaspora
Lobsang Gyatso Sither is a Tibetan born in exile dedicated to increasing cyber security among Tibetans inside Tibet and in the diaspora. Working with Tibet Action Institute since 2011, he has helped to develop community-specific technologies and educational content and deploys them via training and public awareness campaigns at the grassroots level. He works with key communicators and numerous civil society organizations in the Tibetan community.
Iryna Chulivska
Digital Security for NGOs and Media, Long-term Support, Internet Censorship
Iryna is Co-founder and Head of NGO Digital Security Lab Ukraine, Coordinator of FreeNet Ukraine Coalition. She has been working as a trainer, auditor and consultant on digital security for journalists, human rights defenders and activists since 2016. Now she leads NGO which is contributing to policy development in the field of human rights on the Internet in Ukraine, as well as helping local NGOs and media to solve their digital security problems.
Cheekay Cinco
Holistic security, Technology and activism, Community Building, Feminism within Digital Rights, Facilitation
Cheekay is a feminist activist from the Philippines. She designs and facilitates processes for social change groups and initiatives to enable them to understand digital rights issues in relation to other social issues, and to use technology strategically and safely.
Ramy Raoof
Digital Security, Community Development, Research
Ramy is a technologist and privacy researcher, his recent works focus on researching targeted digital attacks against human rights defenders and NGOs and developing digital security protocols and capacity building with activists. Ramy is currently Tactical Technologist at Amnesty International’s Security Lab and he also sits on Tor Project’s Board of Directors.
Constanza Figueroa
Arts, Design and Communications for Advocacy, Holistic Security
Constanza is a designer, illustrator and feminist digital security trainer from Recoleta, Chile. She works as communications officer in Derechos Digitales, conspires with the feminist collective ciberseguras, and draws and researches for acoso.online.
Naomi Fontanos
Education, Community Organizing, Public Policy Research
Naomi Fontanos is co-founder & Executive Director of Gender and Development Advocates (GANDA) Filipinas, an LGBTIQ human rights organization led by trans women in the Philippines advocating for gender, economic, ecological, & digital justice through a decolonial, intersectional feminist approach that challenges systems of oppression not only on the bases of gender, race/ethnicity, and class but as well as on imperialism and colonialism. She is currently a Senior Research Associate at the UP Center for Integrative and Development Studies at the University of the Philippines Diliman and was recently named one of the ‘100 Women We love, Class of 2020’ by GO Magazine.
Paola Villareal
Programming, Data Science, Research, Activism and Government
Paola is a self-taught systems programmer who, since 1998, has worked and played with all things “open” in governments, NGOs, and the private sector. Currently she is the Head of Data Science and Engineering for the National Council for Science and Technology in Mexico’s Government. In October 2019, she was named as one of the 100 most influential women of the world according to the BBC. In November 2018, she was awarded as one of the MIT Innovators Under 35 LATAM and the Visionary of the Year 2018 for her work at the intersection of Data Science and Justice. She was also a 2016-2017 fellow and 2017-2018 affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Her passion for open government and data, civic tech, and civil rights has fomented a curiosity to explore how and where technology, openness, and code can strengthen human rights.