Human Rights Advocate Program Director, Witness
Sam Gregory helps people use the power of the moving image and participatory technologies to create human rights change. An award-winning human rights advocate, video producer, trainer, and technologist, he is Program Director at WITNESS, the leading organization supporting people to use video for human rights. His recent work—including launching the Webby-nominated Human Rights Channel on YouTube and the award-winning ObscuraCam and InformaCam tools—aims to support an ever-growing number of citizen witnesses to share documentation without compromising their own safety, make it stronger as evidence, and contextualize and amplify it so that change is secured.
In 2010 Sam was a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Resident on the future of video-based advocacy. In 2012 he was named a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, and in 2013 his team won a Knight Foundation News Challenge for their InformaCam project.
Sam has worked extensively with human rights activists, particularly in Latin America and Asia, integrating video into campaigns. He was the lead editor on the widely used text Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism (Pluto Press). In 2011 he was a co-editor of the WITNESS report: Cameras Everywhere: Current Challenges And Opportunities At The Intersection Of Human Rights, Video And Technology. He teaches on human rights and participatory media as an Adjunct Lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School. A graduate of the University of Oxford, Sam completed a Masters in Public Policy as a Kennedy Memorial Scholar at Harvard. He is on the Board of the U.S. Campaign for Burma, and the Advisory Board of Games for Change.
