Our Fellows

Marija Ristic is an award-winning investigative journalist and regional director of Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. She is in charge of editorial, training, operations and development aspects of the BIRN Network. She started her career as a journalist focusing on topics related to facing the past, reconciliation and transitional justice before beginning her current work with BIRN’s Balkan Transitional Justice Initiative. In 2015, she produced the documentary ‘The Unidentified’ about war crimes in Kosovo. Ristic is a graduate of the Geneva Academy for International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights and a former fellow at the Free University in Berlin.

Gina Romero is a social activist, social entrepreneur and expert in civic education, youth empowerment and democracy strengthening. She is currently Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Network for Democracy, an association of over 400 civil society organizations, networks, activists, youth, and academics in Latin America and the Caribbean that seek to strengthen democracy, human rights, sustainable development and social cohesion. Gina also serves on the Board of Directors of Fundación Mujeres por Colombia and Corporación Ocasa, where she is also advisor on innovative methodologies.

As an AHDA fellow, Gina will develop a project that focuses on empowering young people, who were not directly affected by the country’s history of violence, to serve as leaders of intergenerational historical dialogue. This project would be done in the context of the historic 2016 Colombia Peace Accord between the Government of Colombia and the FARC.

Gina is a Bosch Foundation Fellow.