Board of Directors

Georgia Popplewell

Georgia Popplewell is a writer and media producer from Trinidad and Tobago. She has worked in independent media since 1989, and in 2005 started Caribbean Free Radio, the Caribbean’s first podcast. She was Managing Director of Global Voices from 2008-2025 and is currently Managing Director of the Bocas Lit Fest, the Caribbean’s largest annual literary festival. While at Global Voices she oversaw the organizations’s operations and programs, in addition to being an editor in the newsroom. She also has a wealth of experience conceiving and organizing events and summits for global participants, often in difficult circumstances.

J. Nathan Matias

Dr. J. Nathan Matias (@natematias) is a computer scientist and social scientist who organizes citizen behavioral science for a safer, fairer, more understanding Internet. A Guatemalan-American, Nathan is founder of the Citizens and Technology Lab, an assistant professor in the Cornell University Department of Communication, and field member in Information Science.

Nathan is founder of the Citizens and Technology Lab, a public-interest research group at Cornell that organizes citizen behavioral science and behavioral consumer protection research for digital life. CAT Lab has worked with communities of tens of millions of people on reddit, Wikipedia, and Twitter to test ideas for preventing harassment, broadening gender diversity on social media, responding to human/algorithmic misinformation, managing political conflict, and auditing social technologies.

Nathan is also a pioneer in industry-independent evaluations on the impact of social technologies and artificial intelligence in society. Toward this end, he co-founded the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, a nonprofit that supports and defends independent research on technology and society.

Alexandra Esenler

Alexandra Esenler is passionate about knowledge sharing and building systems that amplify impact, improve workflows, and facilitate collaboration. Alex has been active in the digital and human rights, media and democracy, and communications spaces for over fifteen years through work with mission-oriented organizations such as OpenArchive,  Global Voices, OpenArchive, the Center for Global Communication Studies, and Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania. She also served as an adjunct professor in Columbia College Chicago’s Media for Social Impact Masters Program. Currently, Alex works as a freelancer working on communications, data analysis, and design projects. She holds a Masters of Public Administration from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelors in History and Communications from McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Rebecca MacKinnon

Rebecca MacKinnon I am co-founder with Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices and presently a board member of the organization.

I presently live in San Francisco, California, where I work as an independent writer, consultant, and advocate for digital rights. Previously I was Vice President, Global Advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation. Prior to that I founded and ran Ranking Digital Rights. My first book, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom, was published in 2012. I am also a founding member of the Global Network Initiative and was board member of the Committee to Protect Journalists. I currently serve on the board of Wikimedia Europe. 

Before moving to California I lived in Washington, DC for 15 years. Prior to that I moved around a lot: In 2010 I was a visiting fellow at Princeton’s Center For Information Technology Policy. In 2009 I was an Open Society Institute Fellow, spending time in Hong Kong, mainland China, the UK and the U.S. and visiting several other countries. In 2007 and 2008 I taught online journalism at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre. From 2004-06 I spent three years at Harvard University, mainly as a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, which is where Ethan and I started Global Voices.

In my younger days, from 1992-2003 I worked for CNN in Asia including as Bureau Chief and on-air correspondent in Beijing and Tokyo. In addition to China and Japan I covered stories from Taiwan to Korea (North and South) to Pakistan. I’m fluent in Mandarin Chinese. In my spare time I enjoy hiking, exploring new cities, going to concerts, eating out with friends, and taking long walks with my husband Bennett Freeman, a former diplomat and veteran advocate for corporate accountability and human rights around the world. .

Dhanaraj Thakur

Dhanaraj Thakur leads the Emerging Technologies Initiative which is part of the Multiracial Democracy Project at the George Washington University Law School. The Initiative aims to center racial justice when it comes technical, governance, and policy questions related to AI and democracy. Over the last 20 years he has worked to advance equity and human rights in tech policy. He has numerous peer-reviewed publications including research on intersectionality in AI development and use, online violence targeting women of color political candidates, and the implications for linguistic equity from the use of multilingual large language models. 

His work has been featured in outlets such as the New York Times, WIRED, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the Guardian, and the Financial Times. He is a member of the advisory board of the Baltimore Digital Equity Coalition. A former Fulbright Scholar, Inter-American Development Bank Scholar, and ISOC Ambassador, he previously led research at the Center for Democracy & Technology. He holds a PhD in Public Policy from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and is a graduate of the London School of Economics, and the University of the West Indies, Mona.