Emily Kassie, New Arizona Fellow, is an Emmy and Peabody nominated investigative journalist and filmmaker. She covers conflict, human rights abuses, and fracture points in the United States and internationally for PBS Newshour, the New York Times, Netflix, FRONTLINE, TIME Magazine, and the Guardian, amongst others. Reporting from the Syrian border to the Saharan desert, her work spotlights criminal justice, corporate corruption, radicalization, refugee crises, war, and climate change. Recently, she reported on the ground in Afghanistan for PBS Newshour where she was smuggled into Taliban territory and met with commanders and regional warlords before Kabul fell.
Her work has garnered three Edward R. Murrow Awards, the Deadline Award, two Overseas Press Club Awards, two World Press Photo Awards, the Peabody Future of Media Award, two Front Page Awards, and eight National Press Photographer Awards. She's the youngest journalist to ever receive a National Magazine Award, of which she's won two. Kassie oversaw visual journalism at Highline, the Huffington Post's investigative magazine, and then again as the Director of Visuals at the Marshall Project. In 2019 she was named Multimedia Journalist of the Year by Pictures of the Year International (POYI) and was a Livingston Award finalist. In 2020 she was named in Forbes “30 under 30.” She was awarded the Academy Award for student documentary for her film I Married My Family’s Killer after graduating from Brown University and was a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge where she completed her master's in international relations.
Her fellowship will focus on her first feature documentary following a search for unmarked graves of indigenous children at a residential school in British Columbia. The film is also supported by the Sundance Institute.
Selected Work
- Undocumented In the Pandemic: A FRONTLINE documentary following an undocumented familyʼs struggle to survive homelessness, immigrant detention, and a rapidly spreading virus.
- Anatomy of Hate: A TIME documentary re-examining the murder of college students in Chapel Hill, NC, how the nation is responding to rising levels of bias-fueled violence, and what constitutes a hate crime under the law.
- The 21st Century Gold Rush: A multimedia project diving into the stories of the CEOs, criminal masterminds, pencil-pushers, and low-flying vultures who have profited from global instability, amidst the biggest refugee crisis in recorded history for Highline.
- The End of Oil: An episode of Netflix’s Explained, focusing on how oil led to huge advancements—along with vast inequities—and the struggle to turn away from fossil fuels
- Detained: An immersive story exploring how the United States created the largest immigrant detention system in the world for the Marshall Project in partnership with the Guardian.
