Kartika Pratiwi, Program Lead, Asia-Pacific

Kartika Pratiwi (she/her/hers) is an activist and communications strategist with over a decade of experience using visual storytelling and alternative media for social change. As Program Lead for Asia and the Pacific at WITNESS, she supports activists, documenters, and grassroots communities in using video and technology safely and strategically to defend human rights, with a focus on cross-regional solidarity.

Prior to WITNESS, she worked as Deputy Manager of Learning and Development at Asia Justice and Rights (AJAR), supporting institutional learning, fundraising, and communications across country teams in Indonesia, Timor-Leste, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and the Pacific. She led the development of secure communications systems, produced digital storytelling content, and managed donor relationships. She also served as Program Manager at EngageMedia, focusing on capacity-building, media production, and the use of open technology and digital security for activists and independent filmmakers across Asia and the Pacific. She is also the co-founder of kotakhitam Forum, a collective exploring Indonesia’s political violence and historical memory through film and education.

Kartika holds a Master of Humaniora and was a fellow of Alliance of Historical Dialogue and Accountability at Columbia University, New York City (2018). Her work has also been supported by the Robert Bosch Foundation through a memory mapping project in Kosovo and Berlin Seminar on “Truth, Justice & Remembrance” (2019). In 2017, she was a John Darling Fellow at Monash University in Melbourne, where she explored video-making as research. As a documentary filmmaker, she has directed several award-winning films, including Arohuai (2017), The Black Orchid (2017), A Daughter’s Memory (2019), and Konta-Sai (2022).