Dart Society

Alysa Landry

Margarita

Margarita Akhvlediani is a founder and editor-in-chief of Go Group/Eye Witness Reporting Studio, based in Tbilisi, Georgia. She also teaches Conflict Reporting, Journalism Ethics and Media Management courses to graduate students at Georgian Institute of Public Affairs. She was a Caucasus Programme Director for Institute for War and Peace Reporting in 2002-2008, managing and training journalists in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and the North Caucasian regions of Russia. She worked as a reporter, editor and producer at Georgian newspapers, radio and TV stations, throughout the civil war and social breakdown of the country in the early 1990s. In 2006, she won a Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalism and spent a year at Stanford University. In 2007, she won a Dart Center Ochberg Fellowship in Journalism and Trauma. She published over 300 articles in local and international media including The Nation.com, Suddeutsche Zeitung, OSCE Review - European Security, Small Wars & Insurgencies and co-edited the book “War and Peace in the Caucasus”, published in 2005.

Donna Alvis-Banks

Donna Alvis-Banks is a recently retired reporter who spent 20 years at The Roanoke Times covering a variety of beats. Dubbed "the compassionate one" in her newsroom, editors often sent her to interview survivors of tragic incidents and gave her the responsibility of narrating stories that saddened and shocked the Southwest Virginia community where she was born and raised. Tops among those stories was the worst school shooting in U.S. history when, on April 16, 2007, a disturbed Virginia Tech student killed 32 people and injured dozens of others before committing suicide. As a result of her work, Alvis-Banks was named a Dart Center Ochberg Fellow later in 2007, and she continues to work with The Dart Society by encouraging other reporters to practice "compassionate journalism."