Christiana Spens is an academic, writer and artist based in London. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of St. Andrews, and before that read Philosophy at Cambridge. She is the author of The Portrayal and Punishment of Terrorists in Western Media: Playing the Villain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and several other books. She writes regularly for publications such as Prospect, The Irish Times, Byline Times, Art Quarterly and Studio International on politics and culture, and is a founding member of Truth Tellers, based at Kings College London.