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Yaara Bou Melhem (Australia)
Journalist and Filmmaker
Independent

Yaara Bou Melhem is a two-time UN Media Peace and six-time Walkley-award winning Australian writer, director and producer who makes films that often tackle the most pressing issues of our time through impact-driven production company Illuminate Films.

After 15 years as an investigative journalist and foreign correspondent, she turned to filmmaking releasing feature documentary, Unseen Skies (2021) (SFFILM, Sydney Film Festival, CPH:DOX) with Participant Media about the artist Trevor Paglen and his mind-bending works that explore surveillance and AI technologies.

She directed and co-produced the ABC TV series The Whiteley Art Scandal (2023) about the biggest art fraud trial in Australian history. She has also made shorts about a nascent Syrian democracy springing out of a former ISIS stronghold and about disinformation with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa.

Her latest film, Yurlu | Country (2025) (Sydney Film Festival, MIFF, FIFDH) is currently on the festival circuit and is a collaboration with First Nations Elder Maitland Parker about his fight to heal his homelands in Western Australia – the largest contaminated site in the Southern Hemisphere. The film has won and been nominated for over a dozen awards including winning the Walkley Documentary Award.