Bio:
Ramita Navai is an award-winning British-Iranian journalist, documentary producer and author. She has reported from over forty countries and has a reputation for investigations in hostile environments.
She was the Tehran correspondent for The Times from 2003 - 2006, with five front pages. She reported for IRIN News (now The New Humanitarian) in Pakistan, Iraqi Kurdistan and Iran, as well as writing for many other newspapers and magazines.
From 2006 - 20012 she was a reporter on Channel 4's Unreported World, making twenty documentaries from countries including Afghanistan, El Salvador, Honduras, Egypt, Burundi, Nigeria and Zimbabwe.
In 2012 she won an Emmy award for her PBS Frontline documentary Syria Undercover.
She has made several news features for Channel 4 News including Tracking down the Refugee Kidnap Gangs which won a Royal Television Society Journalism Award and the Foreign Press Association News Story of the Year Award.
She reported and produced Iraq Uncovered for PBS Frontline and ISIS and the Battle for Iraq for Channel 4’s Dispatches, winning the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, the British Journalism Award for Foreign Affairs and the Frontline Club Broadcast Journalism Award. Iraq Uncovered was also nominated for two Emmy awards (Outstanding Investigation and Outstanding Research).
She reported and produced U.N. Sex Abuse Scandal for PBS Frontline, Channel 4's Dispatches and ARTE. It won the Robert. F. Kennedy 2019 Journalism Award (International Television), and was nominated for an Emmy Awards (Outstanding Investigation), as well as being shortlisted for two Grierson Awards.
Her first book City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death and the Search for Truth in Tehran won the Debut Political Book of the Year at the 2015 Political Book Awards, and was awarded the Royal Society of Literature's Jerwood Prize for non-fiction. It has been translated into five languages.
She is a contributing author to Shifting Sands: The Unravelling of the Old Order in the Middle East (published in the UK, US and soon Turkey).
She is regularly interviewed about her work and has been a guest on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Morning Joe, Sky News, BBC News, BBC Radio 4’s The Today programme among many others.
She appeared as herself in a scene with Mandy Patinkin in episode 1 of the final Homeland TV series.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).