MATTHEW CASSEL 
[journalist and documentary filmmaker]

Matthew Cassel is an independent documentary filmmaker and multimedia journalist based in the Mediterranean region. For more than two decades, his reporting has focused on stories of people affected by conflict, displacement, and political upheaval. A pioneer in web-based video journalism, Cassel has long embraced emerging platforms and tools to reach digital audiences, with most of his work produced for online distribution.

 

Since 2023, he has reported extensively from Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories for The New York Times, The Guardian, Channel 4, the BBC, and others. He directed and filmed the one-hour BBC documentary Settlements Above the Law, which won the Broadcast Investigation award at Amnesty International UK's Media Awards in 2025. He also covered the war between Israel and Hezbollah from Lebanon and reported from Syria in the immediate aftermath of the fall of President Bashar al-Assad.

 

Previously, he spent four years as an on-air correspondent for VICE News, reporting from more than 20 countries in the network’s signature news-documentary style. His coverage included Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Lebanon’s economic collapse, mass protests in Belarus, the Nagorno-Karabakh war, and the Covid-19 crisis in Europe. In 2021, he was part of the VICE News Tonight team awarded an Emmy for Outstanding Newscast. His reporting from Armenia during the 2020 war with Azerbaijan was also nominated for an Emmy.

 

Before joining VICE, Cassel worked primarily as a one-person video journalist, filming, producing, and editing both short- and long-form documentaries for a wide range of outlets.

 

In 2019, he created The Missing, a five-part series produced with the International Committee of the Red Cross and NBC Left Field, which follows the stories of five migrants who disappeared in search of a better life. The series earned him a Rory Peck Award nomination.

 

His 2016 series The Journey, commissioned by Field of Vision and The New Yorker, follows a Syrian family separated by war as they attempt to reunite in Europe. It won Film of the Year at the UN’s Global Migration Festival. His 2013 documentary Identity and Exile, which traces his personal path from Chicago to the Middle East, won News Documentary of the Year at the Monte Carlo TV Festival.

From 2011 to 2014, Cassel was a journalist at Al Jazeera English in Doha. He later moved to Istanbul to help launch AJ+, a digital-first news platform within the Al Jazeera network. He is also the co-editor of Diaries of an Unfinished Revolution: Voices from Tunis to Damascus (Penguin, 2013), a collection of essays by writers from across the Arab world that received a PEN Award.

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From 2007-2011, Cassel lived in Beirut, Lebanon where he was a freelance journalist and photographer. In 2006, he co-founded Picture Balata, a media school for youth from Balata refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. He interned with the VII Photo Agency in Paris in 2005 and was selected for the Eddie Adams Workshop in 2006.

 

In addition to his native English, Cassel is fluent in Arabic. His work has appeared in VICE News, The New Yorker, BBC, The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, AJ+, The New York Times, Arte, NBC News, and many other outlets.