Kirstine Biltoft-Knudsen is a 27- year old Danish journalist taking a year off to study a Master of Journalism and international politics at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Her focus is primarily on American foreign policy but also on the role of religion in Latin American politics. Kirstine has a BA in Journalism from the Danish School of Media and Journalism. She has also studied a semester at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, focusing on Middle Eastern conflicts and politics. Before studying at Columbia University Kirstine worked at the Danish broadcasting cooperation, DR1, for two and a half years doing investigative news stories for the main news broadcast. She has also worked at TV2 Denmark for one and half years, primarily with day to day news and breaking news stories. The past six months she worked as a documentary journalist producing a series of documentaries for the TV-Channel, TV3, and the Danish newspaper, Ekstra Bladet. Kirstine lives in Brooklyn with her boyfriend who works at the Danish mission to the UN.
Ida Hjermitslev is a Ph.D. student at Duke University in the Political Science department. She works within the subfields of political behavior and comparative politics. She graduated from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2014 with an MSc in Political Science. Her primary research focus is party politics in Western Europe. Ida is especially interested in new political issues, single-issue parties, and dimensions of political ideology.
Boris Kanchev is a Bulgarian lawyer currently enrolled in the International Taxation LLM at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. He graduated as a Master of Laws (cum laude) from Sofia University in 2014. Boris was the cofounder and CEO of Better Junior, a company that introduced new ways of recycling nylon bags. Prior to his studies in the US, Boris worked for a law firm in Sofia and provided legal advice to Austrian and Italian companies operating in Bulgaria. He has been involved in several NGOs, including serving as the legal officer of the Association of Bulgarian Leaders and Entrepreneurs as well as the VP of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Bulgaria. Boris received a Fulbright scholarship as well as a scholarship for the Summer Entrepreneurship Program in Babson College, MA and the University of California Berkeley, CA from the America for Bulgaria Foundation. Boris aims to assist multinational companies and entrepreneurs comply with their tax obligations and stay competitive internationally. He is also passionate about defending civil and political human rights, exploring new cultures, music, the NBA and boats.
Kalle Mattila, 24, is a Finnish writer pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia University. He specializes in nonfiction. Kalle’s writing career began as a small boy in Helsinki, when he at age 13 got his first travel story published in Finland’s largest newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat. Many other bylines in various publications followed and Kalle became a weekly TV critic for the same newspaper when he was 16. At 17, Kalle packed his bags and moved to Bosnia to attend the United World College in Mostar as a Finnish Cultural Foundation scholar. He then completed his BSc in International Management (China) at SOAS, University of London, and has since held positions as Community Manager at Finland’s leading think tank, Demos Helsinki, and the publisher Penguin Books in London. Starting out as an intern at Penguin Press, the prestigious nonfiction arm of the publisher, Kalle later went on to execute global marketing campaigns for authors such as Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis, and Naomi Klein. He was shortlisted for Best Digital Marketing Campaign in the FutureBook Innovation Awards in 2013. In his spare time, Kalle likes to dance: he holds three silver national medals in street dance and has won 8th place in the European Championships. He is now at work on his first book.
Aviva Neuman is currently an MFA film student at Columbia University in directing and screenwriting. She received her BA in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College, which is where she found her love for script writing. Between her studies, Aviva worked as a director’s assistant. She also started her own pop-up gallery for contemporary photography, exhibiting a number of Swedish artists. Last summer she wrote and directed her first short film in Stockholm’s Archipelago. This is her 6th year living in New York and she intends to work in both New York and Stockholm after she finishes her studies.
Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein is a PhD student in the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where he focuses on North Korean and East Asian history. He is originally from Sweden and came to the United States in 2013, when he moved to Washington DC to pursue a Master’s degree in international relations at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Prior to that, he worked as an advisor to the Minister for International Development Cooperation of Sweden, and as an editorial writer at the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet.
Constance Tenvik was born in London in 1990, but grew up in Oslo, Norway. In 2009 she got a scholarship through Georgia Rotary Student Program for a year at Reinhardt University in Waleska, GA, to study journalism, but quickly found her way to the art department and the theater department. After that she did a year of printmaking at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, before she completed her BFA at the Academy of Art in Oslo, where she graduated in 2014. Constance’s performances, mind maps and drawings have been shown in cities like Bogota, Copenhagen, Berlin and New York. She is currently working towards her MFA in the sculpture department of Yale School of Art where she will graduate in 2016. Her website is www.constancetenvik.com.