Assia Boundaoui

Assia Boundaoui is an Algerian-American filmmaker, writer and investigative journalist. Her debut short film about *hijabi* hair salons for the HBO Documentary Films the "LENNY" series premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Her award-winning feature-length directorial debut, THE FEELING OF BEING WATCHED a documentary investigating a decade of FBI surveillance in Assia's Muslim-American community, had its world premiere at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival, won the jury prize for Best Documentary at the Woodstock Film Festival and was nationally broadcast on PBS "POV" in 2019. Assia was named one of Filmmaker Magazine's "25 New Faces of Independent Film" and her work has been the recipient of support from the Ford Foundation JustFilms, International Documentary Association, San Francisco Film Society, Impact Partners and Firelight Media and FRONTLINE among others. Assia was a 2019 New America National Fellow and in 2020 was honored to be the recipient of the Livingston Award for national reporting. She is currently a Ford Foundation JustFilms fellow hosted at the MIT Open Documentary Lab Co-Creation Studio where she is iterating a co-created, AI fueled sequel to her film: the Inverse Surveillance Project. She has an M.A. in journalism from New York University and is an Algiers born, Arabic speaking Chicagoan currently based in Southern California.