Knight Press Freedom Fellowship

Mohammed R. Mhawish · 2026

Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism

Mohammed R. Mhawish reported from Gaza through bombardment, surveillance and direct threats to stop his work. In December 2023, an Israeli strike destroyed his family’s home in Gaza City, killing two of his cousins and two neighbors and burying him beneath the rubble. He continued reporting for another four months before leaving Gaza with his wife and young son in April 2024.

Now based in New York, Mhawish continues to report on Gaza from exile. His sixteen-month investigation into Israel’s surveillance apparatus in Gaza was a finalist for the 2026 Livingston Awards, and in 2025 he received the Neal Conan Prize for Excellence in Journalism.

Gustavo Gorriti · 2025

Missouri School of Journalism

Gustavo Gorriti has spent four decades investigating corruption at the highest levels of Peruvian politics. In September 2025, Lima’s then-mayor said he should be dealt with once and for all, a remark press freedom organizations condemned as a death threat. Months later, Congress recommended he be prosecuted over his reporting. He has refused prosecutors’ demands for his private communications, citing reporter’s privilege, and has kept publishing.

Gorriti returned to Peru in 2001 and founded IDL-Reporteros, whose Odebrecht investigation implicated four Peruvian presidents. He had spent nearly a decade in exile, having left under threat after a military intelligence squad abducted him from his Lima home during Alberto Fujimori’s 1992 self-coup.

Mikhail Rubin · 2025

Stanford University

In June 2021, Russian police raided Mikhail Rubin’s Moscow apartment, seized his devices and searched his parents’ home. Proekt, where he is deputy editor-in-chief, was days from publishing an investigation into the wealth of the interior minister’s family. It ran anyway.

Two weeks later, Russia declared Proekt an “undesirable organization,” the first Russian media outlet to receive the designation. Warned that he was likely to be arrested, Rubin left Russia the following morning. He was later designated a “foreign agent.” He has continued investigating Vladimir Putin’s government from exile, most recently mapping how deeply nepotism runs through the Russian state.

Baktygul Chynybaeva · 2024

Knight-Wallace Fellowships, University of Michigan

Baktygul Chynybaeva has spent more than twenty years reporting on healthcare, the environment and human rights across Central Asia. Much of her reporting has been for Radio Azattyk, the Kyrgyz service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which she first heard aged nine, listening in secret with her grandfather on a mountain ridge above their village.

In 2024 she investigated corruption linked to Uzbekistan’s presidential family, and reported on environmental violations around a project backed by Kyrgyzstan’s president. She now faces charges of inciting civil disobedience and mass unrest, the charge used against dozens of journalists detained there, carrying a possible sentence of five to six years. Chynybaeva believes she would be arrested if she returned.

Mikhail Zygar · 2023

Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism

Mikhail Zygar was the founding editor-in-chief of TV Rain, Russia’s only independent television news channel, and led it through its coverage of the mass protests against Vladimir Putin.

On the day Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Zygar wrote an anti-war letter that was signed by prominent Russian writers, filmmakers and journalists and shared online by hundreds of thousands of people. Three days later, he left Moscow.

Russia has since designated him a “foreign agent” and, in July 2024, sentenced him in absentia to eight and a half years in prison over a post about the killing of civilians by Russian forces in the Ukrainian town of Bucha.