 Author,
journalist, and photographer Hadani Ditmars has reported from Lebanon,
Israel/Palestine, and Iraq, often examining the human costs of sectarian
strife as well as cultural resistance to war, occupation and embargo.
Currently, Hadani is a co-editor at the
New
Internationalist magazine.
She was stationed in Beirut for nine
months in 1992 working on an interactive theatre/video project that
brought together displaced Muslim and Christian children, wrote
for the first joint
Israeli-Palestinian magazine
post Oslo accord in 1994 era Jerusalem, and continues to report
from the occupied territories on cultural and political issues.
She traveled to Iran for Sight and Sound and Vogue magazine in 1997
(when Rafsanjani was in power), reporting on gender issues, politics
and cinema.
Hadani’s work, which has also taken
her to Zanzibar, Guatemala, Colombia, Egypt, Ireland, Indonesia,
Italy, India, Jordan, Tunisia and Uzbekistan, has been published
in the New York Times, the London Independent, The Globe and Mail,
Newsweek, Time, Maclean's and Ms. Magazine and broadcast on CBC
and BBC radio and television.
Hadani has been a regular CBC Radio’s
Dispatches contributor since the show’s debut in 2001. She was also
a regular current affairs commentator on Rogers OMNI television
program The Standard.
Her best selling book Dancing
in the No Fly Zone (chosen by the Globe and Mail as one of 100
best and most influential books of 2005) recounts her time in Iraq
from 1997 until the fall of 2003 and is one of the few recent books
on the troubled nation that covers pre and post invasion reality.
As Iraq continues to weather violent occupation, theocratic thuggism
and civil strife, Dancing in the No-Fly Zone serves as an
eerily prescient tribute to a culture and a people at the breaking
point. Hadani’s next book focuses on her return to Israel/Palestine
and Lebanon a decade and half after her first sojourns there.
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