Hadani Ditmars, Canada
Author, journalist, and photographer Hadani has reported from Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Iraq, often examining the human costs of sectarian strife as well as cultural resistance to war, occupation and embargo.
Currently, Hadani is a co-editor at the New Internationalist magazine and has just returned from Baghdad, where she was researching the May issue Iraq: Seven Years Later. She was stationed in Beirut for nine months in 1992 working on an interactive theatre/video project that brought together displaced Muslim and Christian children, wrote for the first joint Israeli-Palestinian magazine post Oslo accord in 1994 era Jerusalem, and continues to report from the occupied territories on cultural and political issues. She traveled to Iran for Sight and Sound and Vogue magazine in 1997 (when Rafsanjani was in power), reporting on gender issues, politics and cinema.
Hadani’s work, which has also taken her to Zanzibar, Guatemala, Colombia, Egypt, Ireland, Indonesia, Italy, India, Jordan, Tunisia and Uzbekistan, has been published in the New York Times, the London Independent, The Globe and Mail, Newsweek, Time, Maclean's and Ms. Magazine and broadcast on CBC and BBC radio and television.
Her best selling book Dancing in the No Fly Zone recounts her time in Iraq from 1997 until the fall of 2003 and is one of the few recent books that covers pre and post invasion reality from a cultural perspective.