About me
Sheryl Mendez has worked for over a decade, providing emergency assistance, logistical support, and advocacy in support of human rights defenders and journalists at risk worldwide. Currently, she is a Senior Program Manager to Freedom House's Emergency Assistance Program. The program provides support to human rights defenders and civil society organizations who are at-risk due to their human rights work. Before joining Freedom House, Mendez worked with the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), engineering, and implementing a program of direct emergency assistance to journalists at risk.
Mendez is a founder of The Crimes of War Project and a research editor of the critically acclaimed book, Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know (WW Norton). She also helped to launch in 2015, ACOS (A Culture of Safety) Alliance, an unprecedented collaboration between news organizations, press freedom NGOs, and journalists to promote journalist safety. In 2017, she was nominated as the Internet Freedom Festival (IFF) Journalism Fellow and helped to curate its program that year. In December 2008, in commemoration of the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, she was awarded the Every Human Has Rights Media Award by Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Mary Robinson and Kofi Annan of The Elders. Mendez is also a widely published photojournalist who has trained journalists and documentary photographers in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe.