Welcoming Reception
8:00 p.m., Wednesday, May 20
Villa Aurora
Please RSVP to 310-573-3603. Shuttle service to Villa Aurora begins at 7:00 p.m. from Los Liones Drive. You can find street parking on Los Liones Drive, off Sunset Boulevard, two blocks northeast from the Pacific Coast Highway.
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Villa Aurora and USC's Feuchtwanger Memorial Library are pleased to welcome Galima Bukharbaeva at a special reception at Villa Aurora.
Born in Tashkent, Bukharbaeva graduated from the Journalism Department of the Tashkent State University in 1997, when she began working for Internews as a television news producer and correspondent for the Zamon news program. At Internews, Bukharbaeva worked with journalists from the United States, France, and other countries. There she learned about international reporting standards, which differed sharply from Soviet journalistic practices, which typically supported government policies.
Bukharbaeva was the correspondent in Uzbekistan for the Agence France Presse news agency between 1998 and 2003. Beginning in 2000, she directed the Uzbekistan Project of the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), which sought to provide independent and professionally written coverage of events in Central Asia by local journalists.
Bukharbaeva's reportage brought attention to the slaughter of thousands of innocent people in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan on May 13, 2005. Bukharbaeva herself was shot while running from government armored personnel carriers and continued covering the massacre. Because of her reports, the Uzbek government filed a criminal case, and Bukharbaeva was forced to flee the country. Bukharbaeva continued her education at the Columbia University School of Journalism, where she organized a 2006 conference about the Andijan massacre. A German resident since 2007, Bukharbaeva writes for the online journal usbek.ru. Her husband, Marcus Bensmann, is a noted Russian journalist who has reported for Deutsche Welle, the German TV channel ARD, and the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
Bukharbaeva and her husband will be at Villa Aurora through December 2009. Stay tuned for additional events with Bukharbaeva at USC and Villa Aurora later this year.
The Feuchtwanger Fellowship is a residency grant of up to twelve months awarded by Villa Aurora in cooperation with USC's Feuchtwanger Memorial Library and important human rights organizations. Honoring writers who are persecuted in their native countries or forced to live in exile, the fellowship was established in memory of Feuchtwanger and the other European exiles who found refuge in Los Angeles during the 1930s and 40s.