Meet Our Team
Thomas Brennan is the Founder of and Executive Director for The War Horse. Prior to studying journalism at Columbia University, he was a sergeant in the Marine Corps and served as an infantryman in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thomas is the co-author of Shooting Ghosts—A U.S. Marine, a Combat Photographer, and Their Journey Back from War. His bylines have appeared in Vanity Fair, Center for Investigative Reporting, and The New York Times.
Samantha Daniels is the Director of Operations for The War Horse. Originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Samantha received her Bachelor’s Degree in International Relations from American University in Washington, DC. As a Marine spouse, she has successfully navigated three military moves and supported two deployments. In 2017, Samantha completed a Master’s of Science in Finance at the University of Pittsburgh. She is currently a 2018 FINRA Military Spouse Fellow and is passionate about personal finance and wealth-building in the military community. When she is not at her computer she can be found trying to convince her garden to grow. She and her husband live in Jacksonville, North Carolina with their beloved dogs Clara and Eleanor.
Vivi Nguyen (she/they) is the Director of Development for The War Horse. Prior to this role, she led development operations at Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, conducted program evaluation research at MDRC, a national policy research firm, and provided direct service education support to underserved student populations. Vivi was raised in Westminster, California, a Vietnamese diasporic community in Orange County, and has worked and lived across the state in the San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay metropolitan areas. She also writes poetry and is an avid scholar of critical theory. Vivi holds a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley and currently resides in Oakland, California with her Boston Terrier, Henny.
Kelly Kennedy is the Managing Editor for The War Horse. Kelly is a bestselling author and award-winning journalist who served in the U.S. Army from 1987 to 1993, including tours in the Middle East during Desert Storm, and in Mogadishu, Somalia. She has worked as a health policy reporter for USA TODAY, spent five years covering military health at Military Times, and is the author of “They Fought for Each Other: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Hardest Hit Unit in Iraq,” and the co-author of “Fight Like a Girl: The Truth About How Female Marines are Trained,” with Kate Germano. As a journalist, she was embedded in both Iraq and Afghanistan. She is the only U.S. female journalist to both serve in combat and cover it as a civilian journalist, and she is the first female president of Military Reporters and Editors.
Daniel Langhorne is the Engagement Editor for The War Horse, managing social media, newsletters, and membership development. He started his journalism career at the Orange County Register as a staff writer covering city government, the Nixon Presidential Library, housing, education, and water. Since 2015, Daniel has reported on military affairs and many other topics for Military.com, Law360, and the Los Angeles Times. Daniel earned his B.A. in English and Political Science from Chapman University. He and his wife live in Long Beach, Calif.
David Chrisinger leads writing seminars at The War Horse and directs the Harris Writing Program at the University of Chicago. Prior to joining Harris, David worked at the U.S. Government Accountability Office as a Strategic Planning and Foresight Analyst and as a Communications Specialist. In 2016, David edited a collection of essays–See Me for Who I Am–written by veterans he taught in a first-of-its-kind writing seminar at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. He graduated from the University of Chicago’s MA Program in the Social Sciences in 2010.
Mitchell Hansen-Dewar is a freelance copy editor and managing editor for DigBoston. He lives in Massachusetts with his spouse and daughter. Mitchell holds an associate’s degree from Le Cordon Bleu in Boston and a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he worked on the student newspaper, The Mass Media. He also works restoring antique furniture.
Ben Kalin is the Research Editor for The War Horse. He worked as a fact-checker for 15 years at Vanity Fair magazine, before starting a full-service fact-checking agency, Fact-Check Pros working with a range of writers such as Ken Auletta, William Langewiesche, Craig Unger, Ezra Klein and former deputy director of the FBI Andrew McCabe. Originally from San Francisco, he graduated with dual bachelor’s degrees in English and Journalism from SI Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two young children.
Bruce Shapiro
Editorial Advisor on Journalism Ethics
Bruce Shapiro is the director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism where he is also a professor of journalism ethics and is the school’s Senior Advisor for Academic Affairs. Bruce has directed the Dart Center since 2006 and is the recipient of the Public Advocacy Award from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies for his work advocating for ethical and responsible trauma reporting as a global practice. Bruce has taught investigative journalism at Yale University and is a contributing editor at The Nation.
Wayne Farmer
Advisor on Business Development and Philanthropy/span>
Wayne Farmer has nearly two decades of experience advising foundations, philanthropists and families at the intersection of advocacy and media, with a focus on impact production. He has been at the helm of several successful non-profit and for-profit organizations, helping to build start-ups and scale established programs. Wayne is active in many philanthropy networks including veterans’ issues, impact investing, and modern slavery. During his time at Arabella Advisors, Wayne worked with the most significant global grant making institutions, including the Gates Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Knight Foundation. When World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn was build the boarding and World Links, an organization that established technology centers to advance educational and multimedia outcomes, Wayne was tapped to build the board and diversify revenue. Prior to World Links, Wayne helped to launch the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Advisors
Robert J. Rosenthal
Senior Advisor
Robert J. Rosenthal is a former member and the former executive director of The Center for Investigative Reporting and an award-winning journalist who has worked with The New York Times, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Rosenthal worked for 22 years at the Inquirer, starting as a reporter and eventually becoming its executive editor in 1998. Robert worked as an editorial assistant on the Pulitzer-Prize winning Pentagon Papers Project, and has also won the Overseas Press Club Award for magazine writing, the Sigma Delta Chi Award for distinguished foreign correspondence, and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in international reporting. Robert was a Pulitzer Prize judge four times and has been an adjunct professor at Columbia University and the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate Schools of Journalism.
Michèle Flournoy
Senior Advisor
Michèle Flournoy is currently the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of WestExec Advisors, a strategic advisory firm. She served as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from February 2009 to February 2012 where she was the principal adviser to the Secretary of Defense in the formulation of national security and defense policy. Michèle began her career as a reporter and has dedicated her life to public service. In 2007, Michèle co-founded the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), where she served as President and later CEO. She now serves on the boards of CNAS, CARE, The Mission Continues, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Amida Technology Solutions. Michèle is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Strategy Group, and has received awards from several awards from the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the American Red Cross.
Dana Priest
Investigative Reporting | Editorial Advisor
Dana Priest is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who has spent the majority of her career focusing on national security, military operations and the U.S. intelligence agencies. Dana’s work has uncovered secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe and deplorable conditions for veterans at the Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington.
In 2014, Dana was named the third John S. and James L. Knight Chair in Public Affairs Journalism at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. She is the recipient of the MacArthur grant, the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the National Defense in 2001, the George Polk Award, and many others.
Tom Jennings
Documentary Film | Editorial Advisor
Tom Jennings has written, produced and directed films that have appeared on PBS, HBO, National Geographic and Discovery and has collaborated with the most esteemed names in journalism. His work has explored police brutality, terrorism, interactive reporting, and virtual reality. In addition to two Polk Awards, Jennings has also won two national Emmy Awards, the duPont-Columbia Silver Baton Award, the Overseas Press Club Award, the Edward R. Murrow Award and four Writers Guild of America Awards.
Jennings teaches documentary writing and production at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and is producer-in-residence at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He is also a professor at Columbia University and Cooper Union.
Karen Stabiner
Immersive Storytelling | Editorial Advisor
Karen Stabiner is the author of the upcoming Generation Chef, which chronicles a year in the life of a young chef as he opens his first restaurant. Her most recent book, “Family Table,” is a cookbook-with-narrative about backstage life at a group of New York City restaurants. Her nine previous books include To Dance With The Devil: The New War on Breast Cancer, a New York Times Notable Book, and her personal favorite, My Girl: Adventures With a Teen in Training. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Columbia Journalism Review, and other national publications. Karen teaches Feature Writing at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and brings with her years of experience in vivid storytelling.
Finbarr O’Reilly
Visual Storytelling | Editorial Advisor
Finbarr O’Reilly was based in West Africa as a Reuters correspondent and staff photographer from 2001 until 2014, and covered wars in Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Chad, and elsewhere. His photography has earned top industry awards, including the World Press Photo of the Year in 2006, as well as numerous awards from the National Press Photographers Association and Pictures of the Year International.
Finbarr left Reuters in 2015 after photographing wars in Afghanistan, Israel, and the Palestinian Territories. He has moved into academia, with fellowships at Harvard, Columbia, and Yale. Finbarr is co-writing a non-fiction book, Shooting Ghosts, that will be published by the Viking imprint of Penguin/Random House. He serves as an advisory member on visual storytelling.
Kathy Roth-Douquet
Military Families | Technical Advisor
Kathy Roth-Douquet is an advocate and author. She is CEO of Blue Star Families, a chapter-based nonprofit organization focused on strengthen military families and our nation by connecting communities and fostering leadership to millions of people. Kathy Roth-Douquet earned her MPA in International Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University where she held a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, and a JD from the University of San Diego School of Law, Magna Cum Laude and the Order of the Coif. While serving at the Pentagon as Principal Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense she received the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service for her work on defense reform. She is also a recipient of President George H. W. Bush’s Daily Point of Light Award, and most recently received the Chief of Staff of the Army Outstanding Civilian Service Award.
Daniel Ellsberg
Whistleblower Protection | Technical Advisor
Daniel Ellsberg is probably best known for his 1971 role in disclosing the previously secret Pentagon Papers, which revealed the true story of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. A Harvard PhD in Economics and former U.S. Marine Corps rifle company commander, he worked at the Pentagon, White House, State Department and the Rand Corporation before he became disillusioned with the U.S.’s role in Vietnam. Since the end of the Vietnam War, Ellsberg has been a lecturer, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful U.S. interventions and the urgent need for patriotic whistleblowing. He is a Senior Fellow of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
Xanthe Scharff
Gender Policy | Editorial Advisor
Dr. Xanthe Scharff is a gender policy expert, multi-media journalist, and social entrepreneur with bylines in Newsweek, Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, among others. Xanthe cofounded The Fuller Project with Christina Asquith in Istanbul in 2015, where she was reporting on Turkish and Syrian women. The Fletcher School awarded Xanthe her doctorate for research on post-conflict education in Africa, during which time she was named the Minear Fellow, an Earhart Fellow and won numerous academic grants. In her 15 years as a social entrepreneur, Xanthe has partnered with and advised dozens of the world’s leading foundations and has raised tens of millions of dollars for causes that support women. She was formerly a Peace Scholar at the United States Institute of Peace.
Partnerships
Thanks to the generous support of our growing community, The War Horse maintains partnerships with the following best-in-class organizations to help accomplish our mission:
Awards & Honors
We’re proud of the work we do, and honored to have it recognized by our peers. The War Horse and members of our staff have been honored for the quality of our work, the ethics of our journalists, and the innovative spirit of our newsroom. Since we began publishing in 2016, The War Horse has received multiple awards:
- 2016 Atlantic Council Nonprofit Leadership Award
- 2017 Ochberg Fellowship at The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma
- 2017 Society of Features Journalism Award for Integrated Storytelling
- 2017-18 HillVets 100 Most-Influential List
- 2018 Regional Robert R. Murrow Award for Investigative Reporting
- 2018 American Legion Fourth Estate Award for New Media
- 2018 Center for National American Security (CNAS) Brimley Fellowship
- 2018 Fellow of the Society Award for Outstanding Service to Journalism
- 2019 Institute for Nonprofit News Emerging Leaders Council
- 2020 NationSwell Council Inductee
- 2020 Top Military Veteran in Journalism Award
The Future of The War Horse
We’re mobilizing new and diverse sources of support to establish a promising path forward. As we’ve built the foundation of our newsroom, our team has reimagined what military news can be. We need your help elevating underreported stories, treating readers as partners, and building on our early success to create a nonprofit newsroom that ensures those most affected by war have a prominent voice in the national conversation.
Our Financials
Our History
Since our founding in 2016, The War Horse has grown to become a national leader in the military and reporting communities. Our work has created international headlines and changed multiple military and federal laws, and our supporters include Fortune 100 companies, Ivy League Universities, leading foundations, and philanthropists from around the world.
The War Horse believes that reporting on trauma comes with a great responsibility. Not only do we expect to hold ourselves to these standards, but we encourage our sources and readers to do the same.
