Emily Kassie

Emily Kassie is a filmmaker, investigative journalist, and cinematographer. Her debut feature documentary Sugarcane premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2024 where it won the Grand Jury Directing Award.

Career
In 2016, Kassie won the World Press Photo award for multimedia on the cover up of DuPont's chemical spill in West Virginia and was also named one of NPPA's 2016 multimedia portfolios of the year for her work on radicalization of ISIS operatives and corruption in the pharmaceutical industry. In 2017 she won an Overseas Press Club Award, a National Magazine Award and the ASNE's Punch Sulzberger award for her work reporting on the profiteers of the refugee crisis, in Niger, Turkey, Italy and Germany.

In 2019, she won the World Press Photo award and was nominated for an Emmy for her New York Times documentary on sexual abuse in immigrant detention. In 2020, she won a National Magazine Award for her immersive documentary on immigrant detention and was nominated for a Peabody Award. She was named to Forbes 30 under 30 list in 2020. In 2021, she was nominated for an Emmy for a Frontline (American TV program) documentary on undocumented immigrants in the pandemic.

She was part of the PBS NewsHour team to win the Overseas Press Club award for a series on the fall of Afghanistan in 2021.

She served as director, producer and cinematographer of Sugarcane (film) with co-director Julian Brave NoiseCat. The film won the Grand Jury Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival.

Early life and education
Kassie received a B.A. from Brown University in 2014 and was awarded the Gates Scholarship to the University of Cambridge where she completed an M.Phil in International Relations and Politics in 2017. In 2015 her documentary "I Married My Family's Killer," on post-genocide intermarriage in Rwanda, won the Academy Award for Student Documentary. The film was broadcast on the CBC.