Rebecca Tinsley
Founder and Director, Waging Peace

Tinsley is a noted British journalist and human rights advocate who has written extensively about human rights violations in Africa. She formerly served as a BBC reporter and has covered major international stories for the Telegraph, Times, Independent, and New Statesman, among others. Interviewing women, elders, and children throughout Sudan, Tinsley has helped to broadcast the daily horrors suffered by some of the country’s most vulnerable citizens.

Tinsley’s many efforts to further human and women’s rights throughout Africa and to bring an end to genocide include founding and directing the London-based non-governmental organization Waging Peace, initiating the Carter Center UK, serving as a member of the London committee of Human Rights Watch, and recently establishing the Rwanda Girls School, a boarding school for poor and orphaned girls.

Tinsley has been chosen as Bennington College’s inaugural Joseph S. Iseman Memorial Lecturer. A longtime Bennington trustee (1969–81) and former acting president (January–July 1976), Joseph S. Iseman believed that education could and should play a major part on the world’s stage. The lecture series, established in 2007 in his memory, seeks to bring to Bennington national and international figures who have devoted their lives to addressing the most pressing issues of our time.