Assia Boundaoui

Assia Boundaoui is an Algerian-American investigative journalist and filmmaker. Her debut short film J'ADORE NAWAL (2018) set in an Arab women’s hair salon in Chicago for the HBO Documentary Films "LENNY" docu-series premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Her award-winning feature-length directorial debut, THE FEELING OF BEING WATCHED (2018) a documentary investigating a decade of FBI surveillance in Assia's Muslim American community, had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival and was nationally broadcast on PBS “POV” and internationally broadcast on AlJazeera. Assia was named one of Filmmaker Magazine's 2018 "25 New Faces of Independent Film,” was a 2019 New America National Fellow, in 2020 was honored with the Livingston Award for national reporting, in 2021 was awarded a Knight-Wallace Fellowship and in 2022 was honored with a United States Artist award. Assia was a fellow at the Co-Creation Studio at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, where she incubated a community co-created, AR-fueled installation, the INVERSE SURVEILLANCE PROJECT. Her most recent short film ESTRANGED LETTERS (2024) had its world premiere at the Chicago International Film Festival, a co-production of Firelight Media and WNET its streaming on PBS’s “American Masters” series. Assia earned a Masters degree in journalism at New York University and is an Algiers born, Arabic speaking, Chicagoan.

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