Excess Baggage

Pierre Kattar

Pierre was responsible for directing, researching and producing the video, audio and photo elements for Excess Baggage. He is an Emmy Award-winning video journalist and documentary filmmaker. He developed his observational style of filmmaking during his ten years at The Washington Post's website where he reported, shot, edited, wrote and produced news and feature video stories. His clients include Frontline, The New York Times, Al Jazeera, the NewsHour, AARP and National Geographic. His work can be seen here: http://www.pierrekattar.com.

Alex Park

Alex did research and writing for all of the Excess Baggage stories. He also helped to develop scripts for the multimedia and audio stories. He is a journalist with an interest in explaining complex social systems, including trade patterns and waves of immigration, for a general audience. He wrote for a year-and-a-half at the American investigative journalism outlet Mother Jones, covering global agriculture and the Ebola crisis in West Africa. Additionally, his research and writing have been published by PBS/MediaShift, New America Media, allAfrica.com, The Believer, Time.com, Grist, and The European Centre for Development Program Management.

Aurora Almendral

Aurora Almendral is a freelance journalist from New York, based in Manila. She's covered subjects ranging from love and death after a disaster, to food, trash and blood sport. Her work been broadcast on the BBC World Service, NPR, PRI's The World, Deutsche Welle, and Snap Judgment, among others. Aurora was a huge help while on the ground in the Philippines and supported the research effort for Finland and Italy. She scripted and edited the audio story for Excess Baggage.

Heather Krause

Heather’s invaluable contribution included working with the Orb team to gather, prepare and analyze data. Heather is a professionally trained mathematical statistician with years of working on complex research problems for non-profit and NGO organizations. She is the founder and principal consultant at Datassist and has worked on every continent except Antarctica. She has a strong love of finding data, analyzing it in creative ways and using cutting edge visualization methods to visualize the results. Her emphasis is on combining strong statistical analysis with clear and meaningful communication.

Neal Rothleder

Neal works at the confluence of data science, cyber security, and cloud. His technical skills are built on a deep foundation in machine learning and data science.

Mark Danner

Mark Danner has written about foreign affairs and American politics for more than two decades. He was, for many years, a staff writer at The New Yorker and contributes frequently to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine and other publications. He teaches at the University of California and at Bard College. Mark helped Orb with final story reviews and edits.