Team

Meet our team and find out more about our partners and donors.

Nataliya Gumenyuk

Ukrainian journalist and author specializing in foreign affairs and conflict reporting. Nataliya is the founder and CEO of the Public Interest Journalism Lab. She is the founding member and lead journalist at The Reckoning Project and the head of the “Life in War” online chronicle.

Nataliya regularly writes for The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Rolling Stone, Die Zeit, and The Atlantic.

Gumenyuk is the author of several documentaries and books, including The Lost Island: Tales From The Occupied Crimea, and Maidan Tahrir.

Lina Kariakina

Ukrainian journalist and media manager; co-founder of the Public Interest Journalism Lab.

Lina is currently the general producer of news at Suspilne, a Ukrainian public broadcaster. In 2011, Angelina joined the Euronews Kyiv bureau, and she covered Ukrainian political and social affairs, Maidan protests, and Russian aggression and conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Later she became a special correspondent and anchor at Hromadske TV, and covered trials against Ukrainian political prisoners in Russia, the refugee crisis in Hungary, co-authored investigations about events at Maidan, for which received a prize for investigative journalism. Then she worked as Hromadske editor-in-chief from 2017 until 2020.

Yevheniia Vasylieva

Before the full-scale invasion, Yevheniia lived in Avdiivka, Donetsk region, and worked on youth policy development in the city and region, in teams of local NGOs. In 2022, she moved to Kyiv and joined the team of the Public Interest Journalism Lab as a project coordinator. She continues to implement projects for IDPs from Avdiivka in different cities of Ukraine.

Anna Tsyhyma

Documentary filmmaker, cinematographer, and the Chief Director at the Public Interest Journalism Lab. She has been reporting on the war in Ukraine since 2014 and has worked in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, occupied Crimea, and Russia. Tsyhyma served as chief director for the independent Ukrainian media Hromadske TV, TVI, and has worked as a director for ICTV.

After the full-scale invasion, she pivoted to frontline reporting, filming the exodus of the refugees from Bucha, the siege of Kyiv and Chernihiv, occupation of Kharkiv, Kherson, and Mykolaiv region. She is the author of The Reckoning Project’s documentaries “The Hospital That Was Taken Hostage”, “Station Kramatorsk” and "Big Water".

Iryna Lopatina

Editor of the Public Interest Journalism Lab's weekly podcast “When Everything Matters”. For almost twenty years she has been working as a reporter for various online media, newspapers and radio stations. She is the author of the audio film "The War That Rapes" about sexual violence during the war in Donbas. Within The Reckoning Project, she documented war crimes in the Kyiv region, cases of deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia and forced expulsion from the Zaporizhzhia region.

PIJL team conducts research and imprement projects in cooperation with:

SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University
Institute for War & Peace Reporting
Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen
The Ronald and Eileen Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia (WCEE), housed in the University of Michigan International Institute
Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic (the Lowenstein Clinic) within Yale Law School
Kharkiv Institute of Social Research
Lviv Media Forum)