Since 2001, Nurgul Asylbekova has worked for the Soros Foundation–Kyrgyzstan. As Coordinator of the Women’s Program and Ethnic Minority Program, Asylbekova has coordinated all related grant programs for NGOs, and provided technical assistance and training to NGOs as well as organizational capacity building. Asylbekova has organized extensive advocacy work around legislative reform on gender, ethnicity, and educational issues. Additionally, Asylbekova has served as a trainer for the Soros Foundation Empowering Education Program and the UNDP Gender in Development Program.

Nadezhda Azhgikhina graduated from Moscow State University with a PhD in journalism, and later taught journalism at the university. She has worked as a journalist for a number of Russian newspapers and magazines, such as Komsomolskaya Pravda, Ogonyok, and Nazavisimaya Gazeta. Since 2001, she has been the Executive Secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists. In 1994, she co-founded and continues to co-chair the Association of Women Journalists. Since 2004, she has been Gender Coordinator for Russia for the International Federation of Journalists. She is also a board member and vice president of “Women’s World,” an international women writers’ association. Since 1996, she has been editor of the international women’s magazine WE/ MY. Azhgikhina is author and editor of 12 books in Russian and English on human and women’s rights, culture, and journalism. She is an author of more than 1,000 articles in periodicals and collections of short stories and essays, and has been translated into 11 languages.

Zuhra Halimova was born and raised in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. She studied with the Department of Oriental Studies at Tajik State University, and later at the School of Indian Languages of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, India. Halimova worked at Tajik State University and the University of Washington in Seattle with the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization. She continued her academic research work, and was awarded the Imam Tirmizi Fellowship at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies, the ACTR/ACCELS Regional Exchange Program Scholarship, and was a Fellow of the Kettering Foundation in Dayton, Ohio. Since 1996 she has been working as the Executive Director of the Open Society Institute Assistance Foundation–Tajikistan, and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Global Fund for Women, the Harm Reduction Advisory Group, and OSI’s General Education Board.

Armenuhi Tadvosyan earned her degree from Yerevan State University and is the Education and Women’s Program Coordinator of the Open Society Institute Assistance Foundation–Armenia, where she has worked for several years. She also earned her certificate at the Teachers College at Columbia University in New York.

Elena Vitenberg graduated with a PhD in social psychology from Saint Petersburg State University, where she later taught Intercultural Communications. She also worked as Human Resources Director at the consulting company Business-link Personnel in St. Petersburg. From 1998 to 2003, she coordinated the Arts & Culture and Women’s programs at the Open Society Institute in St. Petersburg. Since 2003, Vitenberg has been Manager of the international filmmaking project Gender Montage with the Institute for Social and Gender Policy (Moscow), a spin-off of the OSI-Russia Women’s Program.