2025 Women and Media Awards

October 18th WIFP announced and celebrated four media women

These are the four women honored:

Bisan Owda is a Palestinian journalist in Gaza, an activist and a filmmaker. Bisan won a 2024 Peabody Award in the News category and an Edward R. Murrow Award for News Series for her Al Jazeera Media Network show, It’s Bisan from Gaza and I’m Still Alive. The show also won a 2024 News and Documentary Emmy Award for Outstanding Hard News Feature Story: Short Form.

Pam Bailey is a freelance writer and social-justice activist based in Washington, DC, who lived and worked in the Gaza Strip immediately following the 2008/9 Israeli assault and co-founded We Are Not Numbers: emerging writers from Palestine tell their stories and advocate for their human rights. Pam is co-editor of We Are Not Numbers: The Voices of Gaza’s Youth. She has also co-founded in 2020 a non-profit that advocates for people detained in American prisons – called More Than Our Crimes.

Hazami Barmada has held several high-level positions at the United Nations. In 2017, she founded the Humanity Lab Foundation– and its flagship program, The Global People’s Summit–in partnership with the United Nations Office for Partnerships and with the support of the Office of the President of the United Nations General Assembly. Hazami has a Masters from Harvard University where she was  an Edward S. Mason Fellow in Public Policy and Management. In addition to creative daily actions against the genocide in Gaza, Hazami and activists confronted media corporations for their complicity. 

Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo is former senior policy analyst for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. She is the author of No Fear: A Whistleblower’s Triumph Over Corruption and Retaliation at the EPA (2011). Marsha is the founder of No Fear Institute. She is also the president of the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition which fights to preserve historic Moses African Cemetery.