A French journalist, former editor-in-chief of Le Monde and member of The Guardian's editorial board from 2015 to 2020. She was awarded the Albert Londres Journalism Prize for her coverage of Russia’s aggression against Ichkeria. She serves on the board of the Primo Levi Centre in Paris, an NGO which helps refugees who have been victims of torture and political violence. Furthermore, she is a member of the Körber Foundation's History Forum and the ECFR Council.

Natalie Nougayrède is currently involved in mentoring civil society initiatives and media projects in the Eastern Partnership region. Her activities as a Fellow at INDEX and a Residency Fellow for the Center for Urban History will draw from her experiences as a journalist who covered or reflected on crises and wars in the former Soviet space and beyond since the 1990s. She will reflect on the notion of storytelling and the challenges that come from war being observed both from the outside and from the inside, and will look into how storytelling manages or not to share experiences across various boundaries. In this way, Natalie aims to document the experience of war and reflect on the "documentors" themselves.

One of the starting points for her project is Hannah Arendt's book Humanity in Dark Times: "However much we are affected by the things of the world, however deeply they may stir and stimulate us, they become human for us only when we can discuss them with our fellows. (...) We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human".

During her residency, Natalie will also work on the project of launching a new online journal of ideas and culture in English and Ukrainian.