Mustafa Mirza

For the past two years Mustafa has been pitching, producing and shooting doc-styled films for Vice News. His productions have had him travel extensively for both international and domestic stories. His films are character-driven narratives that are investigative in nature and largely cover issues around criminal justice reform, housing, and climate change. Prior to Vice, he produced the four-part PBS series Mysteries of Mental Illness which traced the evolution of mental illness in science and society and explored the attempts across generations to unravel the mysteries of psychiatry, including its causes and treatments. For the series, he pitched stories, produced shoots, ran sound, and took deep dives into the history of science. Filming included a combination of verite and sit-downs coupled with previously unseen archive. He got his start in the doc world at Alex-Gibneys Jigsaw Productions. There, he developed and researched capital punishment cases for the CNN original docu-series, Death Row Stories. He landed that role as after graduating from Columbia Journalism School he worked as an investigative reporting fellow at The Marshall Project covering criminal justice reform. His work there was published in New York Magazine, Vice and Texas Observer. While at Columbia, Mirza investigated police shootings of people with mental illness and that story made it to the front page of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Born in Pakistan, Mirza has moved around all his life. He grew up in Cairo and went to college in London at SOAS.