Board
The board is the policy-making and oversight body of AIIJ. Our current members are:
Olivia Ferriter
Victoria Coman-Jackson
Samuetta P. Nesbitt
Coman-Jackson currently serves as the board’s president, with Nesbitt as its vice president and Ferriter as its treasurer. André Natta, as AIIJ’s executive director, is an ex-officio member.

Olivia Ferriter retired from the U.S. Department of the Interior as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Budget, Finance, Performance and Acquisition. She previously served as Deputy Director, Office of Policy Analysis, and other key roles in the department.
She served on Capitol Hill as a House Appropriations Committee associate staffer and a press secretary for U.S. Rep. Tom Bevill of Alabama. She was also an award-winning journalist, working for The Birmingham News and Newhouse News Service in Washington, D.C.
A graduate of the University of Colorado, she moved back to Birmingham with her family in 2023.

Victoria L. Coman-Jackson is a Birmingham native and a graduate of the Alabama School of Fine Arts (Creative Writing) and the University of Alabama (Journalism). She worked at the former Birmingham Post-Herald as well as newspapers in Washington, D.C.; Ohio; and Louisiana before becoming a Community News Reporter at The Birmingham News and its virtual home, AL.com.
She is currently a freelance journalist and employed in Student Housing and Residence Life at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Samuetta Nesbitt retired as Senior VP of Public Relations and Community Affairs for United Way of Central Alabama, where she was in charge of corporate brand and communications.
She holds a B.A. from The University of Alabama in communications and an M.S. from The University of Alabama at Birmingham in education leadership. She worked as a broadcast journalist in the mid-’70s and in public relations for Compass Bank and Birmingham Public Schools.
Among community honors, Nesbitt received the Woman of Distinction award from the Cahaba Girl Scout Councils and as named among the Top Business Women of 2003 by The Birmingham Business Journal. Professional memberships include The Women’s Network, The Kiwanis Club of Birmingham; The Public Relations Society of Alabama; Leadership Birmingham (1992); and Leadership Shelby County (2014).

André Natta has been AIIJ’s executive director since January 2024. He also serves as BirminghamWatch’s publisher and executive editor. He leans heavily on his experiences in hospitality and economic development in his work and research on place and its impact on access to information.
Natta launched The Terminal, a Birmingham-focused independent news site, in 2007, maintaining it for 10 years. He’s also held editorial or product management roles at the MuckRock Foundation, Resolve Philly, and the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.
The Bronx, New York, native is a past president of the Birmingham Association of Black Journalists and the Birmingham Jaycees, was the founding board president for the Tiny News Collective, an organization helping bring equity into the news and information ecosystem, and a 2018 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. He is a graduate of Leadership UAB and a member of the 2025 class of Leadership Birmingham.