Madeleine Bair

Madeleine leads the WITNESS Media Lab, which is dedicated to addressing the challenges of sourcing, verifying, and contextualizing eyewitness video to advance its use as a tool for human rights. An award-winning journalist, filmmaker, and thought leader, she is an expert on human rights video advocacy, ethics, and the role of citizen video in exposing abuse and bringing about justice.

Before joining the international human rights organization, WITNESS, in 2012, Madeleine served as an I.F. Stone Fellow with Human Rights Watch’s multimedia team, where she created videos and podcasts to accompany field reports of researchers. Prior to that, she traveled the world as a print, radio, and multimedia reporter. She reported on Colombia’s displaced population for the Associated Press, and co-directed/produced the PBS documentary “Can’t Hold Me Back” on the dropout crisis of Latino students in U.S. public schools. A series of first-person narratives on immigration policy she produced for Chicago Public Radio was showcased by the PBS Online NewsHour for distinguished public broadcasting.

In 2010 as a University of California Human Rights Center Fellow, she worked with Jamaica’s leading human rights organization to document a besieged community under a state of emergency and create a series of documentaries on extrajudicial killings that was shown to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights as well as audiences of dignitaries, law enforcement, and interested citizens in Jamaica.

Madeleine earned a dual Masters in Journalism and International and Area Studies from UC Berkeley and a B.A. from the University of Chicago. Her academic studies focused on the human rights impact of the “War on Drugs” in Latin America and the Caribbean. She has spoken on human rights and video at conferences at the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center, the National Conference on Media Reform, Independent Sector, and the Online News Association Conference, and appeared on Smile Jamaica, HuffPost Live, and Chicago Public Radio. She is fluent in Spanish.

Follow Madeleine on Twitter @madbair