2025 AMEJA Awards Jury Members
The board of the Arab & Middle Eastern Journalists Association (AMEJA) is thrilled to announce the jury for the 2025 3rd annual AMEJA Awards. It will also be the 20th anniversary of our founding and we hope our signature event will continue to grow and showcase the best work in the MENA region, our heritage communities in North American and among our members. Meet the jury who will recognize the best reportage of the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region and our heritage communities in North America.
| Reem Akkad is a senior editor on The Washington Post's international desk, known for her leadership in visual storytelling and innovative journalism. She has been instrumental in integrating multimedia elements to create immersive, award-winning stories. Passionate about collaboration, she works closely with photo editors, designers, graphics reporters, video journalists and international correspondents. Reem holds a master's degree in International Relations from Columbia University. Her proudest title, however, is mom to Fareed and Kareem. |
| Kareem Fahim has served as the Istanbul bureau chief and a Middle East correspondent for The Washington Post since September 2016. Previously, he worked for 11 years as a staff reporter for the New York Times, with assignments on the metro desk and as a Cairo-based foreign correspondent reporting on the Arab uprisings and their aftermath. Fahim attended Occidental College in Los Angeles, and Columbia University's graduate School of International and Public Affairs. He grew up in Palo Alto, California and Kuwait. |
| Rami George Khouri is a Palestinian-American journalist and analyst with 50 years of experience in the Middle East. His family resides in Beirut, Amman, and Nazareth. He spent the past 16 years at the American University of Beirut, as director and founder of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs (IFI), journalist-in-residence, visiting adjunct professor in journalism and political science, and in 2000-2003 as the New York City-based Director of Global Engagement. He is now a Distinguished Fellow at IFI; he also heads a research project at the AUB Libraries Archives and the Center for American Studies and Research, to analyze the private papers of the late journalist Anthony Shadid, and Shadid's legacy for journalism and diplomacy today. His work in the Arab region includes writing books and an internationally syndicated column, editing two newspapers (Beirut Daily Star and the Jordan Times) and several magazines, and writing for publications such as the Washington Post and the Financial Times. He continues to author books, do analyses and op-eds for Al Jazeera and the international media, and offer writing workshops and short-courses in the US and the Middle East. He serves on the advisory board of Northwestern University Journalism School in Qatar, and the Palestine Land Studies Center at AUB. |
| Isma’il Kushkush is a Sudanese-American journalist who was based in Khartoum, Sudan, for eight years, where he contributed to The New York Times, CNN, Voice of America and Al Jazeera English. For two three-month periods in 2014 and again in 2015, he was acting bureau chief for The New York Times in East Africa based in Nairobi. He has covered political, economic, social and cultural stories from Sudan, South Sudan, Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, Burundi, Sweden and the United States. He has also worked as a fixer, translator and interpreter. Kushkush grew up in the United States, Sudan, Syria and Kuwait. He received a master of arts degree in journalism from Columbia Journalism School in New York with a focus on politics and global affairs. He is a fluent Arabic-speaker. |
| Yasmin Vossoughian is a National Correspondent for NBC and a frequent fill-in anchor. She previously hosted MSNBC’s “Yasmin Vossoughian Reports.” Vossoughian delivers sharp reporting and analysis from years of international journalism taking a no-nonsense look at the day’s important stories and focusing on solution-based conversations. She has been out front of the biggest stories, from the Trump Hush money trial, to the consequential 2020 election, the mass shooting at Uvalde and the ongoing war in the Middle East. Prior to joining MSNBC and NBC, she was a host and producer for The Daily Share on HLN and an entertainment program on AOL News. |
YOU will vote for the best work of an AMEJA member in the Walid El Gabry Memorial award and in the new feature category.
All winners will receive $500 and a handcrafted wooden box made by Syrian artisans that has become our trademark.
The submission window opens December 15, 2024 through January 15, 2025.
