Ben Mauk, National Fellow, is an independent writer and filmmaker. His interests include migration, asylum, nationalism, and the politics of borders and peripheries. He is an Emmy and Peabody award-winning multimedia journalist whose writing is anthologized three times in the Best American series. He has also been nominated twice for the National Magazine Award. He writes for the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Harper’s, and the London Review of Books, among others.
Mauk’s first film, Reeducated, a collaboration with the New Yorker about the mass internment of ethnic minorities in northwest China, screened at more than 30 festivals, winning jury prizes from SXSW and NewImages, among other honors. He is writing a book of narrative nonfiction for Farrar, Straus, and Giroux on life outside the administrative state, provisionally titled The Fugitive World.
Selected Work
- Reeducated: Inside Xinjiang’s Secret Detention Camps: A virtual-reality documentary and interactive feature for the New Yorker on a mass internment campaign for minorities in Xinjiang, China.
- Mountain Time: An article for the New York Times Magazine about an ambitious walking trail through the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.
- Trillion Dollar Nowhere: A piece for the New York Times Magazine about Chinaʼs efforts to transform global infrastructure from the remote steppes of eastern Kazakhstan.
- Weather Reports: Voices from Xinjiang: An oral history published in the Believer detailing Chinaʼs mass internment drive.
- States of Decay: A Journey Through America’s Nuclear Heartland: An article in Harper’s Magazine on a journey through America's nuclear heartland.