Emily Kassie is an Emmy and Peabody nominated filmmaker and investigative journalist. Her feature documentary Sugarcane, directed alongside Julian Brave NoiseCat, follows an investigation into abuses at a former Indian residential school. Sugarcane, which Kassie also served as a producer and cinematographer, premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival where it won the Directing Award for Documentary. Sugarcane has since garnered 18 international film festival awards and was acquired by National Geographic Documentary Films. It will stream on Disney+ and Hulu in the fall.

Previously, Kassie directed on Netflix's Explained series where she worked with Ethan Hawke and Julianne Moore. She has directed and reported numerous films and visual investigations for The New York Times, PBS Frontline, and The Guardian, among others. Her first documentary I Married My Family’s Killer, on intermarriage in post-genocide Rwanda, won the Student Academy Award in 2015. 

Kassie has worked extensively as a journalist covering geopolitical conflict, humanitarian crises, corruption, and the stories of people caught in the crossfire. Her work has followed the Taliban’s crackdown on women, climate injustice in Nigeria, the exploitation of the refugee crisis, America’s immigrant detention system, drug and weapons trafficking in the Saharan desert, child labor in Turkey, and more. In 2021, she smuggled into Taliban territory with PBS Newshour correspondent Jane Ferguson to report on their imminent siege of Kabul. Her work on sexual abuse in immigrant detention was used in the senate judiciary hearings on child separation at the US border.

Her projects have been honored with multiple Edward R. Murrow, Overseas Press Club, World Press Photo, National Press Photographers awards and National Magazine Awards. In 2019 she was named multimedia journalist of the year by POYi and won the Peabody Future of Media award. In 2020 she was named Forbes 30 under 30 in media. She is a 2023 New America Fellow and Sundance Catalyst Fellow.

Kassie has led visual journalism in U.S. newsrooms for a decade. She was the founding creative director of Huffington Post’s longform magazine, Highline, and was the Director of Visual Projects at The Marshall Project. She’s worked with over a hundred freelance artists, journalists and web developers to create compelling visual storytelling. She initiated the Marshall Project’s partnership with the Sundance Institute, funding short films made by formerly and currently incarcerated filmmakers. 

She graduated with honors from Brown University and was a Gates Scholar at Cambridge where she completed her masters in International Relations.

Contact emilykassie1@gmail.com








Past teaching & speaking engagements

  • Harvard Law School

  • Harvard Divinity School

  • Harvard Kennedy School

  • Mountain Workshop

  • Center for Human Rights and International Justice, Boston College

  • Watson Institute, Brown University

  • National Press Photographer’s Association Short Course

  • Toronto Film Festival Bell Talks

  • School of Communications, Elon University

  • Annual SAFE conference, Vera Institute

  • Honors College, Virginia Commonwealth University

  • Roosevelt House

  • Tenement Museum

  • MBN Y Conference, South Korea