Dr. Khawla Mattar

Dr. Khawla Mattar is the Director of the United Nations Information Center in Cairo since February 2010. She received her Ph.D. and her M.A. in Sociology of the Media from the University of Durham (UK). Dr. Mattar started her career as a reporter, editor and photo editor with different media outlets. Though much of her media experience has been in the Arabian Gulf, she has worked for regional and international media organizations such as the Associated Press and the BBC Television. She moved to the International Labor Organization in 1996 where she took the post of Regional Information Officer. Since then she has managed to promote issues related to basic rights at work focusing on migrant workers, women empowerment and involvement in the labor market, combating child labor, promoting human rights at work. In 2005-2006, she took a sabbatical and, together with a number of prominent journalists, established Al Waqt, a 5 daily newspaper in Bahrain; she was appointed editor-in-chief of the paper, the first woman to hold that position in the country. That same year she managed to cover the Israeli war on Lebanon and later published the book Beirut under Siege: The Israeli War on Lebanon in 2006 (Riad Al Rias Publishing, Beirut 2006). She has contributed a chapter to the edited volume Triumph of the Image: The Gulf War (1993). Dr. Mattar has published papers on the image of women in the media and on migrant workers in the Gulf States. She has been one of the very few women of her time to cover conflicts and wars such as the Iraq-Iran War, the civil war in Lebanon, civil war in South Yemen (in 1996 before the unification of the country), and the Bosnian war.