Shorena Shaverdashvili has 19 years of experience in the field of media, in Georgia.
Over the years, she has been the co-founder and editor-in-chief of popular general-interest magazines, a radio station and the weekly political print and online publication Liberali.
In 2010-2011 Shorena was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Georgian Public Broadcaster, and in 2008-2011 was a co-founder of the media advocacy group Media Club. She also co-founded Media Advocacy Coalition, which became an umbrella for organizations working on media rights. Through these efforts, she actively fought and advocated for media freedoms, freedom of expression and media transparency and accountability.
Between 2013-2019, Shorena held the position of the General Manager of the Publishing and Printing House Cezanne and later became the managing partner at Cezanne Publishing, an independent publishing house specializing in non-fiction titles and translations.Cezanne Publishing also started a paper stationary line which integrates the work of Georgian artists.
In September, 2021 Shorena assumed the position of the Head of the Media Academy, a media institution based on the Georgian National Communications Commission. Media Academy trains journalists through short and long-term training programs, harbours and helps start-ups in digital technologies through the Media Lab and owns a platform called Mediacritic.ge, which provides professional commentary and assessment of media issues and violations of journalistic standards in Georgian media.
Shorena is a graduate of Tufts University, in International Relations and Philosophy.
She is married with three children, Luka (18), Lazare (16) and Cecilia (3).
"Sherman and EPIIC have been the single, most inspiring encounter of my life! I was only a sophomore when I joined EPIIC, and I got very lucky during my "entrance exams". Sherman's "killer questionnaire", which was to test our knowledge of world affairs, and hence help him decide on the EPIIC "dream-team of 1998", was based mostly on the topics I was too familiar with - Russia, post-Soviet countries and good-old Russian Oligarchs. Now we all know about them, but back then, it was a strange word, and concept. Lucky for me, my father had a few Georgian oligarch friends and I knew all too well how they amassed their assets after the break-up of the Soviet union.So, I was in for a year-long adventure, which has been lasting a life-time, thanks to Sherman, who taught us that the world is amazingly and intricately interconnected through serendipitous encounters and our quest for thorough understanding of it's workings, and a deep empathy for human experiences which shape us into super-heroes. Yes, Superheroes! Anyone who has been under Sherman's mentorship knows that anything is possible, through endless curiosity and zeal for life, and learning.I hope for many more encounters with Sherman, where we can drink some Georgian wine and talk about how we tirelessly need to dissect and challenge ideological prisms and mainstream political or cultural narratives of today."