Jehane Noujaim

Jehane Noujaim began as a photographer and filmmaker in Cairo, Egypt, where she grew up. She moved to Boston in 1990, where she attended Harvard University and graduated magna cum laude in Visual Arts and Philosophy in 1996. Earlier that year, Noujaim was awarded the Gardiner fellowship, under which she directed Mokattam, an Arabic film about an Egyptian garbage-collecting village.

Noujaim's controversial documentary, Control Room, about the Arabic-language cable news station Al Jazeera, called into question the prevailing images and positions offered up by the US news media about the war in Iraq. The Los Angeles Times said Control Room gives us a "glimpse of a world where everything is reversed, where our most cherished preconceptions are called into question and reality proves to be a more complex business than we imagined." The New York Times calls it "an indispensable example of the inquisitive, self-questioning democratic spirit."

Noujaim was a producer for the MTV News and Documentary division and worked on the documentary series Unfiltered. Noujaim left her producing job at MTV to produce and direct Startup.com in association with Pennebaker Hedgedus Films. The highly acclaimed documentary has won numerous awards including the DGA and IDA Awards for best documentary.

She has since worked in both the Middle East and the US as a director and cinematographer on various documentaries including Born Rich (Jamie Johnson), Only The Strong Survive (D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus), and Down From The Mountain (D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus & Nick Doob).