Amira Al Hussaini

Amira Al Hussaini is a Bahraini journalist, translator, editor, blogger and wannabe artist - in no particular order. Her experience in journalism spans 17 years, during which she climbed the ladder - starting as a trainee journalist and working her way up to becoming news editor - in an environment not as accommodating to outspoken and free-thinking women as we would wish. Amira has a number of firsts under her cap - she is among the first female Arab news editors in an English language daily and among the first Arab women to win the Dag Hammarskjold Scholarship, which offered her a three-month fellowship to cover the United Nations in New York in 1996. She has since been a frequent visitor to the UN's headquarters in New York, where she continues to cover the General Assembly and Security Council, whenever her travels bring her to the US. Amira's interests cover women and human rights, politics, freedom of expression and democracy and all forms of artistic expression. Having dabbled with everything ranging from oil painting to embroidery to spinning and glazing ceramics, she is moved by the intensity of colour and contours of form. In 2004, Amira ventured into blogging and embraced online media with the same intensity she fell for mainstream media at a young age. Today she is Global Voices Online's Middle East and North Africa and Arabic Language Editor and Voices without Votes editor.