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Barbaros Tapan

Barbaros Tapan was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey. He has built a career in sports and entertainment journalism reporting for a variety of media outlets from the Turkish daily sports news publication Fanatik, CNNTurk, to Turkish TV network TRT and Kanal D.

Tapan moved to Los Angeles in 1996 to pursue opportunities in entertainment journalism. He became the US representative of Turkey’s biggest media company, the Demiroren Media Group, in 2000. He writes for Demiroren Media’s daily newspaper Hurriyet, and currently serves as the US editor of the Turkish Airlines magazine Skylife.

The Entertainment Journalists Association of Turkey has awarded Tapan for his outstanding coverage of Hollywood movies in 2018 for three consecutive years.

He has been a member of HFPA since 2016.

As a producer, Tapan has been producing TV shows for BeIN Media-Turkey.

He is also the founder and president of the Hollywood Turkish Film Festival.

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Meher Tatna

Meher Tatna was born in Mumbai, India and came to the US on a scholarship to Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts where she graduated cum laude with a degree in Economics. For the past 20 years she has freelanced for publications in Asia and her film criticism, essays and interviews have appeared in Vogue, Grazia, Femina and Elle in India, IMN in Singapore and Malaysia, and The New Paper in Singapore. Tatna has been a member of the HFPA since 2002, serving in every position in the Association’s administration including president from 2017 to 2019. During her presidency, the HFPA significantly increased philanthropic giving by expanding its film restoration funding and inaugurating its support of journalistic organizations with million-dollar grants announced at the Golden Globes. In 2018 she was invited to chair the Committee to Protect Journalists’ International Press Freedom Awards in New York with host Bill Whitaker of CBS News.

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Hervé Tropéa

Journalist and author, Hervé Tropéa has worked in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles for over two decades. Hervé co-hosted the primetime TV show Les 7 péchés capitaux for the number one TV Channel in France, TF1, and was a regular contributor for LCN, CNN news channel in Quebec, Canada, as well as for the international news channel i24News. Tropéa also made a name for himself with his interviews in Hollywood for the publishing group, Prisma Media Vivendi, and for the group FIGARO. Hervé Tropéa also published six books.

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Katherine Tulich

Katherine Tulich graduated with a BA (Communications) from the University of Technology in Sydney before beginning her career at the prestigious Sydney Morning Herald, writing music and film reviews as well as major features. Since then she has written for the press in Australia and around the world including Rolling Stone, Elle Magazine, Hello Magazine, New Zealand Herald, Sunday Telegraph, Sun Herald, The Australian, Women’s Weekly, Woman’s Day, WHO magazine, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Cleo and Cinema Papers. She was also the Australian correspondent for the Hollywood Reporter, Billboard and Entertainment Weekly. Based in the US since 2002, she was the entertainment reporter for the highly-rated Australian breakfast show, Sunrise, as well as hosting weekly radio segments. She also became a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and Variety. She was invited to appear alongside Richard Roeper on the renowned “At the Movies” TV show filling in for Roger Ebert. Katherine regularly corresponds as an entertainment reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on their national breakfast television program, ABC News Breakfast, as well as ABC radio stations throughout Australia. She is a member of the Film Critics Circle of Australia (FCCA) and FIPRESCI.

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Kirpi Uimonen

Kirpi Uimonen is a Finnish entertainment journalist and has been a member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association since 2011.

She started her career in Helsinki in the early ’90s covering music, TV shows, movies, travel, beauty, health, and fashion. In the early 2000’s she took a job as a sub/managing editor at the youth magazine Suosikki.

In late 2002, Uimonen moved to Los Angeles. Since then she has been writing for several different publications like Aamulehti, Apu, Episodi, Helsingin Sanomat, Ilta-Sanomat, Me Naiset, Metro. Her TV interviews have been aired on networks like MTV3, Nelonen and YLE. To broaden her knowledge of media, she studied photography at Santa Monica City College.

In addition to her journalistic work, Uimonen has been an active member of the Finnish community in Los Angeles and continues working with Finnish artists. Before joining the HFPA, she was on the board of The Finnish American Chamber of Commerce on the Pacific Coast and helped publicize FinnFest, an annual Finnish festival, in 2011.

She previously produced the HFPA in Conversation podcast series for the goldenglobes.com website and was on the HFPA’s TV committee. She is currently serving her fourth year on the HFPA board of directors.

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Alessandra Venezia

Alessandra Venezia was born in Italy, graduated in Lettere Moderne with a specialization in Theater from Università Cattolica in Milano in 1974. She worked with Dario Fo (Nobel Laureate for literature) in his Milan theatre and later at Il Teatro Pier Lombardo.

In 1982, she moved to Los Angeles and received her Ph.D. in Italian at UCLA with a dissertation on Dario Fo. During this time, Ms. Venezia also taught Italian language and literature at UCLA. In parallel with her academic career, she began her journalistic pursuits in Los Angeles.

Writing for the newspaper Il Messaggero, she then moved on to the Italian national publications L’Unità and the well-respected newsmagazine Panorama from 1986 to 2006. From 1996 to 2016, Ms. Venezia wrote for Vogue Italia and L’Uomo Vogue.

She has complemented her written work since 2003 with broadcast journalism, serving as the U.S. cinema and television correspondent for Sky TV Italia. Her work in TV started with TELE+, interviewing on-air personalities and collaborating on the production of many original documentaries.

Since 2007, Ms. Venezia has been the U.S. entertainment correspondent for IO Donna (the weekly magazine of Corriere della Sera). A member of the HFPA since 1987, Ms. Venezia was honored with the Publicists Guild’s International Media Award in 2004.

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Marlène von Arx

Marlène von Arx covered events for her local paper in Switzerland while still in school and got her first job to write about entertainment for a Swiss TV Guide soon after graduation. At the age of 25 she moved from her native Switzerland to Los Angeles to cover film and television as a freelancer for newspapers and magazines in Switzerland. She currently works for the CH Media newspaper group, daily and weekend edition (Schweiz am Wochenende), the news platform www.bluenews.ch, the Tagesanzeiger supplement Fokus, Migros Magazin and Schweizer Illustrierte – all in Switzerland

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Yuko Yoshikawa

Born and raised in Osaka, Japan, Yuko Yoshikawa has been working as a film journalist for over 30 years, covering press junkets, premieres, film festivals and the Academy Awards. She currently contributes to Cinematoday, Flix, and TV Guide. Her articles have also been published in Asahi Shimbun, Nikkei Entertainment and Elle Japon amongst others. She received her MA in Cinema Studies from NYU and initially worked on numerous Japanese television documentaries including The World of Roger Corman, The Sundance Film Festival Special, The Academy Awards Special, Stanley Kubrick and Katherine Hepburn. As a producer, her credits include the anthology horror film Trapped Ashes (directors: Joe Dante, Monte Hellman, Ken Russell, Sean S. Cunningham and John Gaeta) which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2006, and the comedies Home Sweet Hoboken, starring Ben Gazzara (2000) and Sleepy Heads (1997). She was the recipient of the International Media Award at the 53rd ICG Publicists Awards in 2016