Yaara Bou Melhem (Australia)
Journalist and Filmmaker
Independant

Yaara Bou Melhem is a journalist and documentary filmmaker whose work has received two UN Media Peace Awards, two New York Film & Television Festival Awards and five Walkley Awards.

Yaara’s debut feature-length documentary, Unseen Skies, interrogates the inner workings of mass surveillance, computer vision and artificial intelligence through the works of US artist Trevor Paglen, and recently screened in competition at the 2021 Sydney Film Festival. Production partners include Oscar-winning Participant (USA) and In Films (AUS). Yaara has also directed documentary shorts including War on Truth, about Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Maria Ressa and the Filipino editor’s global campaign against disinformation. She was a foreign correspondent with Dateline, SBS TV and Al Jazeera English for more than a decade. Yaara is currently directing a series for the ABC, and is the inaugural journalist-in-residence at the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism & Ideas where she will work on journalistic experimental film.