Experience: State-building, lobbying and advocacy campaigns, multilateral negotiations, leading newsrooms and sensitive press in areas of armed conflict. 

Languages: Arabic and English

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Bio: Thuraya Dammaj (@ThurayaDammaj) is a Yemeni journalist, and is a prominent activist in the fields of rights, freedoms, accountability, good governance, and humanitarian relief. Currently, Thuraya Damaj heads the promising news platform "Yemen Future", as one of the few Yemeni women who lead a continuing career of this kind, and largely independent. 

During her career, she led projects with the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) as a local coordinator of the federation, which includes more than 600,000 journalists in more than 100 countries around the world. Damaj also led coordination efforts to draft a code of ethics and a new trade union regime project through a high-ranking team of Yemeni journalists and media professionals. 

Thuraya is considered as one of the prominent independent youth for change, which qualified her to take a seat in the National Dialogue Conference as an independent member of the State Building Team concerned with basic constitutional outputs. There she was the head of the small committee to prepare the report for this qualitative team, in addition to being a reviewer of the army and security team in its endeavor to endorse civil and human right aspects in these sovereign institutions. After the end of the National Dialogue Conference, Thuraya was chosen as the head of the media team concerned with leading the campaign to promote dialogue decisions as a national reference for the transitional process and the desired Yemeni state. Thuraya worked as a coordinator and facilitator for many monitoring teams on rights, freedoms, and women's participation, including reports of the Yemeni Journalists Syndicate and reports on the status of women issued by the "Awam" cultural development and civil organization for which she was its executive director. 

She also worked as an executive director of the Al Jazeera Center for Human Rights Studies and an editor in the English section of the Saba News Agency. From her multidisciplinary activities, courses, workshops and programs that it has participated in, Dammaj has gained rich experience in project preparation, priority building, and related financial policies. 

She comes from the Ibb governorate, and belongs to a activists family pioneering in human rights and culture to which the late great novelist Zaid Muti 'Dammaj is known for his novel “The hostage”, the head of the Authors and Writers Union Ahmed Qassem Dammaj, and the Minister and Governor Muhammad Hassan Dammaj. 

Thuraya Damaj holds a bachelor’s degree in translation from Sana'a University. She is a master’s student in political sciences, a journalist in both Arabic and English. She is a member of the Yemeni Journalists Syndicate, the International Federation of Journalists, the Union of Arab Journalists, the president of the "Aann" development organization, and the vice president of the Yemeni Alliance for Transparency and Combating Corruption, and member of the feminist solidarity network.