Medill Documentary Program Faculty

Brent E. Huffman

Director of Documentary Journalism

Brent E. Huffman is an award-winning director, producer, writer, and cinematographer of documentaries and television programs. His work ranges from documentaries aired on Netflix, VICE, The Discovery Channel, The National Geographic Channel, NBC, CNN, PBS, MTV, and Al Jazeera, to Sundance Film Festival premieres, to ethnographic films made for the China Exploration and Research Society.

He has also directed, produced, shot, and edited documentaries for online outlets like The New York Times, TIME, VICE NEWS, Salon, The Atlantic, Huffington Post, and PBS Arts.

Huffman has been making social issue documentaries and environmental films for nearly three decades in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

These films have gone on to win numerous awards including multiple Primetime Emmys, Chinese Academy Award, Silver Plaque from the Chicago International Film Festival, IAFOR Documentary Film Award, MacArthur Foundation Grant, Best Film at CinemAmbiente International Environmental Film Festival, Grand Prize and Audience Award at Arkhaios Archaeology and Cultural Heritage Festival, Best Conservation Film-Jackson Hole, ten Cine Golden Eagle Awards, and a Grand Jury Award at the American Film Institute’s SILVERDOCS.

Huffman was also an editor of Julia Reichert’s and Steven Bognar’s Primetime Emmy winning PBS documentary series A Lion in the House now on Netflix.

Huffman’s documentary Saving Mes Aynak, about the fight to save a 5,000-year-old ancient city in Afghanistan threatened by a Chinese copper mine, has won over 35 major awards and has been broadcast on television in over seventy five countries. It can currently be seen on Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, OVID, and on special edition DVD from Icarus Films.

Huffman is currently directing The Future is Written in Stone about Yemeni women fighting to save the threatened cultural heritage of Yemen during the war. The documentary is supported by the Pulitzer Center and Buffet Institute for Global Affairs.

Huffman’s Strands of Resistance, about a Uyghur underground railroad in Pakistan, premiered on VICE NEWS TONIGHT on Showtime and won Best Documentary Feature at the Rory Peck Awards at the British Film Institute in 2023.

Huffman produced Finding Yingying, a Kartemquin Film about a Chinese family searching for their missing daughter in the U.S. Finding Yingying won the Breakthrough Voice Award at SXSW and the Chinese Academy Award for Best Foreign Documentary in 2020. Finding Yingying is distributed by MTV Films/Paramount+ in the US. Finding Yingying was nominated for an Emmy in the Best Investigative Documentary category in 2021.

Brent Huffman is also the Director of Documentary Journalism and a Professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University where he has taught documentary production and theory since 2009.

http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/directory/faculty/brent-huffman.html