Profile
of Nalaka GUNAWARDENE
Nalaka Gunawardene is Director and Chief Executive
Officer of TVE
Asia Pacific (TVEAP, www.tveap.org), a non-profit media
organisation that works across the Asia Pacific region, using
television, video and new media promoting sustainable development and
social justice. Nalaka counts nearly 20 years of professional experience,
first in the mainstream media and later in communicating development
in its broadest sense.
Nalaka has spent the past decade in building
up TVEAP as a communications organisation that both produces
and distributes TV, video and online content that is factually based
and journalistically packaged. Nalaka has commissioned and/or executive produced
a large number of factual programmes (documentaries, shorts,
studio debates) on a wide range of topics and themes from health, human
rights, disarmament and environment to
ICTs, disaster management, clean energy
and poverty reduction. In that process,
he has worked with independent film-
makers and production companies from East Asia,
South Asia, Southeast Asia and the South
Pacific in his region, and with counterparts
in Europe and North America. TVEAP programmes,
all made to international broadcast standards,
are aired on national and regional channels
across the Asia Pacific, and on BBC World
TV's Earth Report, Hands On and Life strands.
In response to the Asian Tsunami of 2004, Nalaka
originated a major new project named Children
of Tsunami, a multi-media effort
that tracked the recovery stories of eight
affected families in India, Indonesia,
Sri Lanka and Thailand: www.childrenoftsunami.info
By background and training, Nalaka is a science
and development journalist. Before co-founding
and heading TVE Asia Pacific in 1996,
Nalaka was an award-winning science communicator.
He first worked with the print and broadcast
media in his native Sri Lanka, and later
at Asia Pacific regional level. He also
served as an editorial consultant to United
Nations organisations including UNESCAP,
UNEP and UNDP, and was a communications
specialist with IUCN – the World
Conservation Union.
Nalaka is a founder director of Panos South
Asia (www.panossouthasia.org) and has
recently become a trustee of the London-based
Science and Development Network (www.scidev.net).
He is a contributing
editor of Digital Review of Asia Pacific (www.digital-review.org)
published by UNDP-APDIP, UNESCO Orbicomm
and Canada’s IDRC. He was a researcher
and writer of the pioneering Sri Lanka
Human Development Report on ICTs, published by UNDP-APDIP in 2004.
For
TVE: Asia Pacific: Moving Images, Moving
People
Email: nalaka@tveap.org
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