Assia Boundaoui is an Algerian-American journalist, writer and filmmaker. She has reported internationally for Public Radio International, AlJazeera, VICE and CNN among others. Her debut short film about hijabi hair salons for HBO Documentary Films "Lenny" series premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Her award-winning feature-length film, 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 and was nationally broadcast on PBS “POV.”
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 awarded a Unites States Artist fellowship. She is currently a fellow in the Co-Creation Studio at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, where she is incubating a co-created, AR-fueled, sequel to her film: the Inverse Surveillance Project. Assia has an M.A. in journalism from New York University and is an Algiers born, Arabic speaking, Chicagoan.