Jonah Kessel

Jonah M. Kessel is the Deputy Director of Opinion Video at The New York Times. Mr. Kessel’s video journalism is a hybrid of explanatory and investigative short form documentary and other innovative forms of visual journalism. Previously, he worked in The Times’s newsroom as the director of cinematography and as an international video correspondent. From 2011 to 2016, he covered Asia for the video desk, working out of the Beijing and Hong Kong bureaus. He has reported on the ground from over 25 countries for The Times. He is fluent in a large variety of camera technologies, including studio, aerial, high speed and infrared cinematography. In 2013, Mr. Kessel was the field video journalist on the team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting “for its penetrating look into business practices by Apple.” He was one of the first correspondents to bring Josh Wong’s story to the world in a 2014 profile. He reported on marriage trafficking of Rohingya in Myanmar as well as conflicts surrounding jade and opium. A 2016 short documentary helped open the world’s eyes to the influence of the Chinese internet. As tensions between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un were dangerously escalating in 2017, he produced a documentary with Nicholas Kristof inside of North Korea. In 2018, he was the Director of Photography for the feature documentary series Operation InfeKtion: Russian Disinformation from Cold War to Kanye. And in 2019, he made an invisible gas visible in a series named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Mr. Kessel is a two time World Press Photo winner. He has four times been named a Multimedia Journalist of the Year from Pictures of the Year International, and has been awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Justice and Human Rights Reporting and the Innovative Storytelling Award from the National Press Foundation.