Atlantic Fellow Salman Usmani appointed as Atlantic Institute Communications Coordinator
We are delighted to announce that Global Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity, Salman Usmani, has joined the Atlantic Institute team as our communications coordinator. A communications expert and a campaign strategist, he will work closely with the communications lead, Maria Jeffery, and multimedia editor, Fionnuala Sweeney, to promote Atlantic Fellows and the Atlantic community on a global stage to grow their influence by amplifying their impact on the world.
Over the past 14 years, he has worked in journalism, advertising and media production across themes ranging from climate change and public health to democracy and human rights. He used his editorial, creative and technical expertise to lead over 40 impactful advocacy and communication campaigns and create a variety of narrative and knowledge products in various formats for leading nonprofits and research organizations, including the Aga Khan Foundation, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, the World Health Organization, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Article 14 and SEEDS. As a journalist, his work has been published by leading news organizations and cited in seminal research.
As editor of special projects at Article 14, he managed digital editorial projects that combined multimedia content with deeply investigated stories and oversaw a dynamic team of content creators, researchers, graphic designers and tech experts. Here, he also played a pivotal role in the sedition database project, an interactive research website with a visualization of a database of over 13,000 cases filed under India’s sedition law that was eventually cited to successfully argue against the misuse of the provision in the Supreme Court. Similarly, at the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative UK (CHRI), he led a team of researchers and UI and UX designers to visualize and publish the Media Archive project, an interactive database of multimedia news stories of exclusion during the COVID-19 pandemic covering three countries in the global south. At Velocity Creative, a multidisciplinary communications company he founded in 2015, Salman led various multi-format communication projects for a wide range of clients and some of the films he directed were screened at global convenings of organizations like FAO and UNDRR.
As an Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity, Salman serves on its program committee for 2024. He holds a master’s degree from LSE where he studied inequalities, political communications, social network analysis, and media and technology policy. His dissertation examined the role of the media in a majoritarian public sphere. Salman's work as a Fellow includes narrative change and developing information architecture and methods to map networks of hate and disinformation. In his spare time, he enjoys watercolor painting, fly fishing and being in the outdoors.