Arctic Contacts

Alice Qannik Glenn is an Iñupiaq born and raised in Utqiaġvik, Alaska. She hosts and produces her own podcast show called Coffee & Quaq to celebrate and explore contemporary Native life in urban Alaska. Her episodes play on KRFF 89.1 FM Voice of Denali, KONR-LP Out North Radio, and KBRW 680 AM/FM and her work has been featured in Alaska Magazine, Anchorage Daily News, AK Humanities FORUM Magazine, CBC Unreserved Radio, and more. She currently serves on the board of Alaska Native Media Group and is one-third of Native Time, a collaborative media platform that highlights the real Alaskan experience through multi-media productions.

She received her bachelor’s degree in aerospace studies from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in 2014. Alice enjoys diversifying her career path and is passionate about providing accurate and authentic Alaska Native representation in media.

Photo by Minik Bidstrup

Katie Toth is most passionate about sharing stories that get to the heart of a subculture — from the dynamics of grassroots protest movements to the struggles of the exotic dance industry. Her work has been published in VICE, Teen Vogue, National Public Radio and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Now based in Canada’s subarctic community in Yellowknife, her journalism about the North comes from a place of intimacy and mutual respect. She reports on the human impacts of climate change, maritime issues, health in remote communities, and Indigenous rights and reconciliation.

Laureli Ivanoff, Inupiaq and Yupik, is a freelance print and radio journalist in the fishing and hunting community of Unalakleet, Alaska. Laureli has written for the New York Times, was a regular columnist for Alaska Dispatch News and contributed to the Alaska Public Radio Network.

She is a veteran reporter of the 1,000-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. She covered the political and cultural aspects of the 25th anniversary of the melting of the “Ice Curtain” between Russia and the United States in Anadyr, Russia. She specializes in bringing indigenous perspective to newsrooms. Today she writes of the Alaska Native experience and knowledge in relation to policy, climate change and culture. She’s interested in writing about the indigenous experience of climate change and geopolitics throughout the Arctic.

Naina Helén Jåma is a freelance photojournalist educated at the Nordic School of Photography. She is an indigenous Southern Sami, born in Norway, currently based in Stockholm, Sweden. With an editorial experience from Sweden’s largest photo agency, flexibility and versatility are one of her strengths as she masters both a wide range still photography and short format film. News, portrait, sports, film, conceptual shoots and longer stories. Her main motivation is to tell stories in the best possible way, meet people, as well as focusing on graphic forms and lights.

Featured in Women Photograph and a member of Sami Artist Association.

Granted a working grant from The Saami Council 2020, for a project on traditional knowledge in South Saepmie.

Take a look at some of her work at: https://www.nainahelen.com

Published in: Aftonbladet, SvD, VG, The Guardian, Huffpost, Tidningen Samefolket, Metro, Arbetet and Dagens Industri among others.

Gloria Dickie is a Canadian freelance journalist specializing in climate change and Asia’s interest in the Arctic. She has reported from northern mainland Norway, Svalbard, Iceland, Alaska, and the Canadian Arctic, as well as from China, Vietnam, Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Nepal, India, and France.

Her latest Arctic reporting looks at the feasibility of a railway from the terminus of the Northern Sea Route in Kirkenes to Rovaniemi; how polar cod are responding to shipping vessel noise in Nunavut; spy wars along the Norway/Russia border; and China’s ambitions in the Canadian Arctic.

Her work appears in The Guardian, The Atlantic, Wired Magazine, Scientific American, Al Jazeera English, PRI’s The World, Science News magazine, National Geographic, Canadian Geographic, Arctic Today, and Arctic Deeply, among others.

Ossie Michelin is an award-winning Inuk freelance journalist and filmmaker from North West River, Labrador. He writes for a number of publications in Canada and internationally, and is currently Indigenous Editor-at-Large with Canadian Art Magazine. His journalism around Indigenous Land and Water defending has received international acclaim. Ossie comes from a long line of storytellers, he writes about all things Indigenous, and the North with a capital N.

JohnJo Devlin is a BBC journalist, radio producer and podcast creator based between Oslo and London.

His journalism centres on the arctic environment, energy, Nordic business stories and nature. He has strong links with environmental groups across Norway and a track-record of interviewing senior politicians in the region.

JohnJo’s favourite projects involve working with hard-to-reach groups, and he’s gone behind the scenes with whalers in the Barents Seas and wolf-hunters in Norway’s Østfold region. He has worked for international news outlets including the BBC and NBC as well as UK publications like the Telegraph, Independent and Evening Standard.

Julie is an Australian science communicator, geologist, and writer living in Greenland. She is interested in Arctic science, environment, and geopolitics, and particularly in the unique voice and perspective of Greenland in  the Arctic. Julie has written for popular science outlet, Massive Science, Greenlandic print media, and extensively for mineral resource trade journals and geoscience academic publications. She hosts Polar Podcasts – personal histories of the geological exploration of Greenland from the 50s to the present (https://polarpodcasts.buzzsprout.com/)  – and publishes a weekly blog on living in Greenland as a foreigner (www.arcticalien.net). Julie has a PhD in Geology and a Masters degree in Science Communication and Public Engagement.

Jenna Kunze is a freelance reporter covering Alaska. Currently, she is the lone journalist writing for the only newspaper based in the U.S. Arctic, the Arctic Sounder. in 2019, she was selected as a Pulitzer Center grantee to report on how the Alaska Native people living at the top of the world are adapting to a changing landscape. Her work mainly focuses on the intersection between Iñupiat life, environment and culture.

After a decade working for French public radio as a sound engineer and podcast producer, Benoît relocated to Sweden in 2009 in the hope of catching a glimpse of the elusive northern lights. Initially a freelance correspondent for a number of French-speaking radio channels and music magazines, Benoît transitioned into videography, which has become his prime activity.

He is a regular video journalist for the BBC and other international media (CNN, Al Jazeera, Associated Press, Business Insider), working both as a one-man-band videographer, with Stockholm-based BBC freelance reporter Maddy Savage and as a member of larger Swedish and international filming crews. Benoît has worked on projects in Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Finland as well as most parts of Sweden, such as Lappland, Jämtland, Värmland, Göteborg, Skåne and of course Stockholm.

Maddy Savage is an award-winning British journalist and broadcaster based in Sweden. She enjoyed a decade-long BBC career in London before relocating to Stockholm in 2014, after falling in love with Scandinavia during numerous reporting assignments across the region.

Since working as a freelance foreign correspondent for media including the BBC, NPR, HuffPost and Monocle, Maddy has focussed on Nordic worklife trends. She has reported extensively on business culture, gender, wellbeing, integration, housing and city planning and sustainability. Maddy produced and presented the BBC World Service radio documentary Meet the Neighbours, about solutions to loneliness in Sweden. She was series producer for The Nordic Way, an eight-part deep-dive video and text project for BBC.com, about life in Scandinavia.

Maddy has reported from northerly locations including Jämtland, Dalarna and Västerbotten (Sweden) and Trøndelag (Norway), and enjoyed time off exploring the lakes and forests surrounding Kiruna in the Arctic Circle. She regularly works alongside Arctic Bureau videographer Benoit Derrier.

Malte Humpert is a Senior Fellow and Founder of The Arctic Institute, a non-partisan think tank based in Washington DC. In addition to providing strategic direction for the organization, his research focuses on Arctic geopolitics, Northern Sea Route shipping and shipping scenarios, and China’s and Russia’s political and economic interests in the region. Malte also works as a journalist for High North News, an Arctic-focused newspaper out of Bodø, Norway where, in 2018, he was the first journalist to report on Maersk’s historic container ship voyage through the Arctic. He previously worked as a senior energy analyst for the Inter-American Development Bank, where he assessed renewable energy potential in countries throughout Latin America, analyzed their legal and regulatory framework, and issued policy recommendations.

Malte is author of The Future of Arctic Shipping – A New Silk Road for China (2012), which was selected by the Council on Foreign Relations as one of the “10 must-reads of the year” alongside articles from the New Yorker and New York Times. He has provided expert opinion to NPR, the Associated Press, BBC, among many others. He has also been published in The Arctic Yearbook, Port Technology International, and European Geostrategy.

Malte holds a Master’s degree in European Studies from Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and a Bachelor’s degree in political science from California State University, Northridge. He was recently selected as a prominent alumni of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, a select list which includes less than 100 individuals.”

Nils Adler is a British-Swedish freelance journalist. He is currently working on an ‘innovation series’ which looks to highlight lesser-known responses to environmental issues. Nils has written for a wide range of publications and his photographs have been featured in the Guardian, Al Jazeera and El País.

He has reported from a number of regions including the UK, Turkey, Ukraine, Malta, Iraq, Mozambique, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Ethiopia and Belarus. Nils is currently based in Stockholm, Sweden.

Nils is a big fan of the night train from Stockholm, Sweden to Narvik, Norway. He has worked on two projects from the Scandinavian Arctic region. Nils is interested in the role Sweden, Norway and Finland play in the Arctic Council, as well as the United Kingdom’s participation as non-Arctic state observer.

Jimmy Thomson is a northern-focused journalist. He spent three and a half years living and working in the North, first as a video journalist with CBC North and subsequently as a freelance journalist. He has worked in every Arctic country, from the Russian port of Murmansk and the Solovetsky Islands to Svalbard and the diverse communities of the Canadian Arctic.

Jimmy has been published in National Geographic, Canadian Geographic, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, VICE, Up Here and Up Here Business, The Narwhal and many others.

He has won a number of awards for his work including two Canadian Online Publishing Awards, a Sigma Chi Delta Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Edward P Murrow Award from The Radio Television Digital News Association, and an investigative journalism award from the Canadian Association of Journalists, among others.

He is a recipient of grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research. He has also produced award-winning videos, and had photos published in Canadian Geographic, the Globe and Mail, Up Here, VICE, The Narwhal and more.

Dave Walsh is an Irish writer, editor, photographer and communications strategist based near Barcelona. He has worked extensively on environmental issues in the Arctic and Antarctic regions, including working for the protection of reindeer herding forests in Finnish Lapland, documenting the impact of climate change on Greenland’s glaciers, and the effects of ocean acidification in the Arctic Ocean in Svalbard.

Dave is communications advisor to the Clean Arctic Alliance, a coalition of 19 non-profit organisations working to limit the environmental impact of Arctic shipping, and to Our Fish, a pan-EU campaign to end overfishing.

He has worked with Greenpeace International, the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition, and is a board member of The Arctic Institute.

Alexandra is a researcher, with a PhD in Economics and Business Administration from the University of Oulu. Her research focuses on the socio-economic changes that happen in the Arctic. It aims to answer the questions: How to develop the Arctic in the most sustainable way possible? What global instruments shall there be in place? How to secure that local communities and indigenous people benefit from Arctic exploration?

She has published both scientific and media articles on sustainable business development, demographics, human capital, innovations, employment, and connectivity solutions in the Arctic. Alexandra is skilful in communicating science in constant dialogue and using science diplomacy tools. Her publications appeared in The High North News, Arctic Today, and The Norwegian American.

Irene Quaile-Kersken is a journalist specialising on polar issues, environment and climate. 

She writes the Ice Blog, which she created in 2008 for Deutsche Welle and now runs independently. Her posts, focusing on environmental and climate change and their impacts on polar regions, also appear on Radio Canada International’s  Eye on the Arctic and in German in Polar Journal. She has reported from various Arctic regions, including Greenland, Svalbard and Alaska.

Irene has been specializing in the Arctic since 2007, when she was invited to make a series of radio documentaries for the International Polar Year with the support of the National Science Foundation. This was the beginning of a love affair and also of a deep concern for the icy regions of our planet and how we are changing them.

She worked as radio and online Correspondent for Environment and Climate Change and as Features and Magazine Programming Editor with Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international broadcaster, until 2019.  She was also the editor and presenter of DW’s award-winning weekly radio show “Living Planet.”

Irene has also worked for German national radio, Radio Netherlands, the BBC and ABC Radio National, Australia. She has received several international awards, including a New York International Radio Festivals gold medal and a United Nations gold award for outstanding radio. 

Irene is originally from Scotland and holds a first-class honors degree and a Ph.D from St. Andrews University.

Alec Luhn is an American correspondent based in Moscow who has frequently reported from the Arctic, covering oil spills, permafrost thaw, reindeer herding, polar bear patrols, Gulag towns and the world’s only floating nuclear power plant, among other topics. He is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists and has a special interest in how climate disruption affects the relationship between northern peoples and animals.

Cheryl Katz is a California-based freelance science and environmental journalist with a special interest in the Arctic. She has reported extensively from the High North over the past decade, including Greenland, where she was a National Science Foundation selected media visitor, Svalbard, where she joined a Norwegian Polar Institute Arctic research voyage across the Fram Strait, and multiple trips throughout Iceland and Arctic Norway. One of her main journalistic goals is to show a distant public the beauty of these remote places while raising awareness of the threats they face.

Her recent stories have covered the environmental and cultural impacts of glacial recession, ocean warming, ecosystem disruptions, biodiversity, natural resource issues, and more. A former newspaper reporter with a master’s degree in science communication, she specializes in making complex topics understandable and interesting for a broad audience.

Her articles have appeared in leading popular science and environment publications, including National Geographic, Yale Environment 360, Hakai Magazine, Eos Magazine, Arctic Deeply, and Scientific American, among others

Alexander is a freelance journalist, researcher and fixer based in the university city Uppsala, a few kilometres north of Stockholm. He lived a couple of months in Tromsø, Arctic Norway and has a background in History, Sociology and Cultural Anthropology with a specific interest in bringing academic research into the media.

He runs a project called ‘Lost in a Cup’ in which he aims to foster conversations in society via creating events where people discuss topics of broad societal interest, starting from a base of university research. Additionally, Alex has been active in Student-Radio both in Tromsø and Uppsala and currently sits on the board of Studentradion i Sverige (Sweden’s student radio), the umbrella organisation that connects all student broadcasters in Sweden.

Kim Insuk (b.1985, Seoul, Korea) is currently working at Visit Greenland, the national tourism board of Greenland as a web editor. Insuk received a MA degree in Cultural Heritage Studies (2013) from University College London. She wrote a master’s thesis on Greenland’s cultural and natural heritage affected by climate change.

In 2010, after travelling Greenland alone, she totally fell in love with the country. In 2015, she started her second master’s degree in West Nordic Studies at the University of Greenland.

Currently she is finalizing her thesis. Insuk has written articles about Greenland for Travel Magazine Bricks and Polarian for the Future in Korean language from 2017 to 2019. As a fixer for TV and Arctic documentary, she has worked with YTN Science, Mokpo MBC and WWF UK. Insuk published her first book, “그린란드에 살고 있습니다 (I live in Greenland)” and held the first solo photo exhibition in Korea with photos taken in Greenland in 2019. She is registered as a semi-volunteer at Greenland Oil Spill Response.

Insuk is interested in the abandoned U.S military bases in Greenland and the international relations between Greenland, Denmark and the U.S.

Kevin McGwin is a journalist writing for Arctic Today and an occasional contributor to Greenlandic weeklies Sermitsiaq and AG. He is the former editor of The Arctic Journal and has written for a variety of other Arctic-related websites. He has been writing about Greenland and the Arctic since 2006.

Pascal Vossen (b. 1983, Netherlands) is a documentary photographer who’s work explores the relationships between people and their immediate environment. The impacts they both have on each other, whether this is through troubling socio-economical circumstances or those driven by a passion and desire to live a certain life. He received his MA degree in photojournalism and documentary photography (2014) from the UAL and is living and working between London and the Scottish Highlands.

After graduating he spent the first four years as a photojournalist covering human interest stories from around the world. Becoming a father made him realise that he wanted to search for meaning closer to his turf. Remembering the joy of growing up in a small village reignited in him an interest for life in the rural communities. He prefers to spend his free time roaming the Scottish hills and mountains and it’s through these experiences that he gravitates towards the free spirited, those with alternative ways of thinking and living.

Alongside assignments he is currently working on multiple long term projects; a young Swedish man struggling with fatherhood and reoccurring incarceration – a project that touches upon masculinity, identity and belonging. And an exploration of Grampian mountain communities in the Scottish Highlands, where he juxtaposes local traditions with modern influences and growing collective concerns about the ever changing landscape. His previously completed works play with the notion of an ‘Americanisation’ of other cultures and how this has influenced people’s behaviour or position in society.

His photography has been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions including; GUP Gallery in Amsterdam (2014), the Museum for Contemporary Art in Rome (2015) and Fotografiska Museum in Stockholm (2017). His work has been commissioned and published by among others The (Sunday) Telegraph, The Atlantic, Marie Claire UK, GUP Magazine, de Volkskrant and the British Journal of Photography and appeared in e.g. I-D, Ain’t Bad Magazine and L’oeil de la photographie.

Werner is a German-born journalist and photographer based in Sweden. He has long been an avid nature enthusiast, something which sparked his interest in the Arctic region.

Werner writes for a number of international print and online media outlets with a focus on outdoors, sports, sustainability and travel topics. His background as a cyclist naturally draws his to sports stories set in the great outdoors.