Maral Jekta

Managing Director, JX Fund

Maral Jekta is the Managing Director of the JX Fund, which supports independent media in exile. Her work focuses on organisational resilience, audience access, sustainable funding and the long-term development of exiled media organisations.

She has more than fifteen years of experience in media development, democracy support, research and conflict-sensitive programming in Germany and the MENA region. Before joining the JX Fund, she worked as Senior Researcher and Programme Lead at Tehran Bureau, an independent media outlet covering politics, society and corruption in Iran.

Prior to this, she spent six years as a researcher at ufuq.de, where she worked on online narratives, disinformation, radicalisation processes and social conflict in pluralistic societies. Earlier in her career, she led projects at Media in Cooperation and Transition (MiCT), managing international media development programmes in crisis and transition contexts, particularly in Iraq.

At the JX Fund, she works to strengthen the conditions under which exiled media can remain editorially independent, financially viable, organisationally resilient and accessible to audiences in restricted information environments.