Career
 | This biographical section is written like a résumé .(August 2020) |
Di Giovanni began reporting by covering the First Palestinian Intifada and Nicaragua in 1987 for the London Times and The Spectator and has reported on other conflicts since then. [14] Di Giovanni has described herself as a "human rights reporter" [16] with a focus on war crimes and crimes against humanity.
She has reported on the genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda and currently Syria. She continued to write about Bosnia, and in 2000 she was one of the few foreign reporters to witness the fall of Grozny, Chechnya. She received awards for her depictions of the terror after the fall of the city, including the Amnesty International Prize and Britain's Foreign Correspondent of the Year. [17]
During the war in Kosovo, di Giovanni traveled with the Kosovo Liberation Army into occupied Kosovo and sustained a bombing raid on her unit which left many soldiers dead. Her article on that incident, and many of her other experiences during the Balkan Wars, "Madness Visible" for Vanity Fair (2000), won the National Magazine Award for reporting. [18] She later expanded her article into a book for Knopf/Bloomsbury. [19]
In 1999, she became a contributing editor to Vanity Fair [17] and continued to report for both The Times and Vanity Fair in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as Africa. Later, she reported on the Arab Spring. Many of her early essays were compiled in a book published by Bloomsbury, The Place at the End of the World. [20]
In 2010, di Giovanni was the president of the Jury of the Bayeux-Calvados Awards for war correspondents. [21]
In 2013, di Giovanni joined Newsweek as Middle East Editor and began working primarily in the Syria, Egypt, Kurdistan, Lebanon and Iraq regions. She also continued to work in North Africa and in South Sudan. [22] That year, di Giovanni was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world of armed violence by the organization Action on Armed Violence. [23]
In 2014, she was a consultant on Syria for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and a Senior Policy Manager/Advisor at the Centre for Conflict, Resolution and Recovery for the School of Public Policy at Central European University. She has worked with researchers from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. [24]
In a Newsweek article titled "The Fall of France" in 2014, di Giovanni extensively criticised the French social and taxation systems. Following publication, a number of points she cited to support her argument were deemed inaccurate. "Les décodeurs", the fact-checking blog of the French newspaper Le Monde, reported nine mistakes. [25] These mistakes included "The top tax rate is 75 percent, and a great many pay in excess of 70 percent" when in actuality it is "companies not individuals who must pay this tax, which only applies to salaries over a million euros". [26] Additionally her claim of milk costing €3 a half liter in Paris and nappies being free to new mothers were inaccurate as, "the price of milk, which they pointed out, costs around €1.30 a litre, while neither creches nor nappies are free". [27] The article was also severely criticised by Pierre Moscovici, the French Minister of Economy. [28]
In 2016, di Giovanni was awarded the Courage in Journalism prize from the IWMF. [29] She also won the Hay Medal for Prose from the Hay [30]
She has made two long format documentaries for the BBC. In 2000, she returned to Bosnia to make Lessons from History, a report on five years of peace after the Dayton Accords. [31] The following year she visited Jamaica to report on police assassinations of civilians, Dead Men Tell No Tales. [32]
Di Giovanni was the subject of a documentary about women war reporters, No Man's Land (1993) which followed her working in Sarajevo. She is one of the journalists featured in a documentary about women war reporters, Bearing Witness (2005), by Barbara Kopple and is also a subject in the documentary film 7 Days in Syria (2015), [33] [34] [35] directed by Robert Rippberger and produced by Scott Rosenfelt. The film had a screening at the House of Lords. [36]
In 2018, di Giovanni was appointed as the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations [37] and was also serving as adjunct professor of international and public affairs at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. [38]
In 2019, di Giovanni was named a Guggenheim Fellow. [39] Di Giovanni is also a senior fellow at Yale University Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. [40]
In 2022, di Giovanni founded The Reckoning Project: Ukraine Testifies, [41] a non-government organization that trains conflict journalists and researchers to gather legally admissible testimonies documenting war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine. [42]
