Lila Hassan
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About
Lila Hassan is an award-winning independent investigative journalist. She has reported from Cairo, Doha, Istanbul, Paris, and New York.
Her work has appeared in web, print magazine, documentaries, and podcasts, and her reporting has been published in The Washington Post, Wired, The Nation, Mother Jones, The Intercept, PBS' flagship investigative show FRONTLINE, Reuters, The Guardian, ProPublica, HuffPost National, Business Insider, Drop Site News, and more. Her awards include: the Newswomen’s Club of New York Front Page Award (Online Investigation, 2024), the Livingston Award (2024), the Pulitzer Prize (International Reporting, 2022), the George Polk Award (Television & State Reporting, 2022), and a Peabody (2022).
Hassan has served on the juries of the inaugural Shireen Abu Akleh Award by the Overseas Press Club (2025) and the James Foley Conflict Reporting Award (2021, 2022) and holds several committee positions at the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association. Her work has been supported by The International Women's Media Foundation, Type Media Center, The Fund for Investigative Journalism, and she has received a Silvers Grants from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation (distributed by the New York Review of Books). Hassan was also selected as an Aspen Ideas Fellow in 2023.
Hassan has also been an adjunct at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, teaching the craft and essentials of journalistic reporting and writing, local news, and immigration. She was also previously an associate at the Simon and June Li Center for Global Journalism, where she served as a course aide to the school’s signature conflict reporting course and provided research on the global journalism industry.
She holds an M.S. from Columbia Journalism School’s specialized Toni Stabile investigative program, where she was a Lorana Sullivan fellow. She holds a B.A. in political science with honors from CUNY Brooklyn College, where she was a Scholars Program student and a Jeannette K. Watson fellow.
Research and Interests:
- Long-form research and reporting
- Human rights and international law frameworks
- Extremism and counterextremism narratives and policies
- Digital-physical world connections
- Ethical, cross-border collaborations within journalism
Teaching
- Immigration (global and local)
- Conflict reporting
- Journalistic Storytelling Across Media
- Advocacy & Solutions Journalism
- Newsgathering
Publications
Archiving Gaza: The Race to Save Evidence of War Crimes and Mass Destruction (Drop Site News, 2025)
Armed & Untouchable: ICE’s history of deadly force (Business Insider, The Trace, Type Investigations, 2024)
ICE agent’s don’t fire warning shots (Business Insider, The Trace, Type Investigations, 2024)
Popping Off. They Make Viral Gun Videos-With Hardline Christian Values (Business Insider, The Trace, Type Investigations, 2024)
The Impossibility of Reporting the Story of Gaza (The Nation, 2023)
