🇴🇵🇪🇳 🇹🇴 🇼🇴🇷🇰
✰
🇴🇵🇪🇳 🇹🇴 🇼🇴🇷🇰 ✰
I’m Mustafa — an Emmy-nominated NYC based Producer and Shooter.
I specialize in bringing premium cinema quality to niche stories using small crews in an authentic documentary style.
Since 2020, I’ve been pitching, producing and shooting doc-styled videos for VICE News. I directed my first hour-long doc, When Murder Isnt Murder, last year which covered the story of LaKeith Smith who is in prison for murder because a cop killed his friend.
My productions have covered both international and domestic stories with a focus on criminal justice reform, housing, and climate change.
Prior to joining VICE News, I had been working on a high-profile four-part PBS documentary about how we've gotten to our collective understanding of mental health as a society. For the series I pitched stories, produced shoots, and took deep dives into the history of psychiatry. Filming included a combination of verite and sit-downs coupled with previously unseen archive.
I got my start in the doc world at Alex-Gibneys Jigsaw Productions. There, I developed and researched capital punishment cases for the CNN original docu-series, Death Row Stories. I landed that role as I had, after graduating from Columbia Journalism School, worked as an investigative reporting fellow at The Marshall Project (TMP), a non-profit investigative newsroom which specializes in covering criminal justice reform. My work there was published in the New York Magazine, Vice and Texas Observer, among other publications. I also contributed to TMP’s Life Inside series which was honored as a finalist for a prestigious National Magazine Award.
While at Columbia, I investigated police shootings of people with mental illness and that story made it to the front page of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
I was born in Pakistan and have moved around all my life. I grew up in Cairo and went to college in London at SOAS.
I'm actively looking for new work these days, please get in touch if you have questions or ideas for collaboration!
