Board

Hoda Osman – President
Hoda is a New York-based freelance journalist and a consultant for CBS News. She is also the financial correspondent for France 24′s Arabic channel. Prior to that, Hoda worked as a field producer at the investigative unit of ABC News in New York, which she had joined in 2003. Before coming to the U.S., Hoda worked at the Associated Press Television News (APTN) in Cairo, Egypt and freelanced with several other news organizations. While in Egypt, she also wrote about political, social and business issues for a number of publications. Hoda has a BA in journalism and an MA in Middle Eastern Studies.

Jamal Rayyis– Vice-President
Jamal is a freelance writer and editor, specializing in gastronomy, culture and politics. He has authored seven editions of the book Food & Wine Magazine`s Wine Guide (2002-2008) and his work has appeared in several magazines, including Food & Wine, Departures, Wine & Spirits, and Wine Enthusiast, as well as The New York Times, Fodors, and several internet publications. He is also currently the Director of Alwan for the Arts. He did undergraduate work at the University of California and graduate studies at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where he now resides.

Kareem Fahim – Treasurer
Kareem has been reporting from Tunisia, Egypt and Libya on the historic Arab uprisings for The New York Times after joining the paper in 2005 to work on the metropolitan beat. He grew up in Kuwait and northern California, and is a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of International and Public Affairs.

Walid el-Gabry – Board Member
Walid is an Anglo-Egyptian journalist with more than two decades of experience in Europe and the US. He was AMEJA’s first president and came to the US with the Financial Times as Americas corporate news editor to cover the biggest scandals of the past decade including the collapse of Enron. He spent almost nine years with the paper in London and New York before moving on to US news agencies Dow Jones and Bloomberg News to cover the global financial crisis that resulted from the meltdown of mortgage-backed derivatives. Walid`s newspaper career began in Istanbul in the late 1980s working as a reporter for Turkish publisher Sabah. He then worked for Canadian publisher Thomson at various UK titles, becoming industry editor of a major Scottish daily newspaper. He was a judge in the 2007 Gerald Loeb business journalism awards.

Golnoush Niknejad – Board Member
Born in Iran, Golnoush Niknejad moved to the US when she was 17. She holds a BA in Political Science and Writing and a law degree with an international and European focus. Following her initial news work in Southern California and Massachusetts, Niknejad moved to New York City and earned two Masters degrees in journalism from Columbia University, focusing first on print and then politics and government. Niknejad is on the board of the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association. Her work includes reporting for PBS/Frontline, the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune, TIME Magazine and California Lawyer. She launched Tehran Bureau in November 2008. Tehran Bureau is now in partnership with PBS/Frontline.

Ashraf Khalil – Board Member Ashraf is an Egyptian-American correspondent who has covered the Middle East for most of the past 15 years. His work has appeared in Foreign Policy, the Times of London, the Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, The Economist, and the Middle East edition of Rolling Stone. He is a former Los Angeles Times correspondent in Baghdad and Jerusalem, and a former editor-in-chief of the Cairo Times independent weekly news magazine. He is the author of Liberation Square: Inside the Egyptian Revolution and the Rebirth of a Nation.

Mahdis Keshavarz – Board Member
For nearly a decade Mahdis Keshavarz has worked at the forefront of groundbreaking human rights issues. She has placed thousands of news stories and op-eds with various media outlets – including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, BBC, The Village Voice, and Al Jazeera – on behalf of her clients. Her client roster includes international dignitaries, Hollywood stars and numerous film festivals and events focusing on the Middle East community for both a domestic and an international audience. An accomplished advocate of human rights and social justice issues, Keshavarz has written for the online magazine Slate and has appeared as a commentator on BBC and Democracy Now!. She serves on the advisory board for the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association, the Center for Social Inclusion, and the Alston Bannerman Fellowship Program.

Rima Abdelkader – Board Member
Rima is a New York-based multimedia journalist. She recently joined NBC and has previously written for The Huffington Post, The Dinar Standard, The Daily Star, The New York Daily News, Today’s Zaman, Elan Magazine, Women’s eNews, MediaGlobal Newswire, Arabisto Online, among others. She has produced stories for Al Jazeera English, Bridges TV, and CUNY TV, among others, and has written, reported, and produced her own stories. In her spare time, she is a social media coach, and mentor for aspiring journalists. Have a story idea? Contact her at rima.abdelkader@gmail.com or @rimakader on Twitter.

Carina Kamel – Board Member
Carina has been a journalist for more than nine years and is currently Al Arabiya TV’s Senior Correspondent and Presenter based in London. Carina is responsible for all aspects of Al Arabiya’s European and US business news coverage and her role includes presenting daily live reports in Arabic on financial markets as well as Arab business news from a global perspective. Carina also regularly produces TV segments and reports from the field.
Previously, Carina worked as Europe Correspondent for CNBC Arabia and CNBC Africa for more than 5 years, also based in London, and regularly reported on the Middle East for CNBC Europe and CNBC US. Carina has anchored CNBC Arabia’s coverage of major events including the World Economic Forum in Davos, the US Presidential Elections in 2008 and the G20 Summit in London in 2009. Carina has also served as a senior judge at the Foreign Press Association awards for the past five years.

Tamer el-Ghobashy – Board Member
Tamer reported for The Wall Street Journal from Tahrir Square during the recent revolution in Egypt. He joined the paper as a criminal justice reporter in July 2010. Prior to that, he was a national news editor at NBC Local Integrated Media, a position he started in 2009. Previously, he was a staff writer at the New York Daily News for nine years where he covered local, national and international news including Hurricane Katrina, the attacks of September 11th 2001 and the 2006 war in Lebanon. Tamer graduated from New York University in 2000 with a bachelors in Journalism.

Mona Iskander – Board Member

Mona is an award-winning producer and correspondent for Need to Know on PBS, a weekly, national news magazine show. Her work has taken her from the streets of Cairo, Ramallah and Amman to the remote island of Kiribati in the South Pacific to report on climate change. She has traveled from one US coast to the other to find out how the economy has affected Americans. Mona worked for the weekly news magazine show “NOW” on PBS and previously as an associate producer for CNN where she worked on both breaking news and long-form feature stories. She has a master`s degree from the Columbia Journalism School.