Vanessa Escuer

A journalist by profession and vocation, Vanessa Escuer is currently head of Communication at alterNativa Intercanvi amb Pobles Indígenes, where she works with political advocacy and communication projects, among them IndiFest and the Barcelona Indigenous Film Festival. She has a degree in Journalism from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and has worked as a freelancer for several media outlets including El País, Al Jazeera, and Página/12, as well as reporting on the postwar situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Palestine-Israel conflict, the runup to independence in Kosovo and its aftermath, and the crisis of the refugee camps in Western Sahara. She spent a year living with the Dalit community, documenting and learning first-hand about slums in India, and two years covering political and social news in several African countries, with stories about the war in South Sudan, and the health emergencies of the Afar people in the Danakil Desert in Ethiopia, inter alia. She has also worked in Argentina, where she investigated the theft of babies after the military dictatorship, and water theft and expropriation of land from the Indigenous Huarpe people by agroindustry multinationals. She also worked as a co-screenplay writer and research editor for the Sundance TV documentary film, The Best Day of My Life, about the lives of LGBTIQ+ people in countries like Uganda and Russia.