Faculty
Belle Cushing is an Emmy-award-winning documentary film producer and journalist. She has made documentaries, shorts, and news specials for platforms including HBO, Showtime, Hulu, The Marshall Project, and Vice. Her work has taken her to Latin America, Europe, North Africa, and across the U.S.
She is interested in stories that explore the unseen and challenge conventional understanding. The search for hidden worlds often leads her to stories about power, how it is abused, and who is impacted. She approaches these questions with a combination of investigative reporting and empathetic storytelling: This has meant constructing narrative out of body camera footage and police interrogation videos; or infiltrating a criminal network with hidden cameras; while always working to create spaces of intimacy and trust on-screen. She understands documentary work, and the act of entering into people’s lives with a camera, as an immense privilege, which demands constant care and re-evaluation.
For several years, she worked as an international producer with Vice News making news documentaries on immigration, corruption, and criminal justice. Her work has been honored with five News and Documentary Emmy awards and five Emmy nominations, a Foreign Press Association award, a George Polk award, an Edward R. Murrow award, and a Front Page Award. In addition to being a freelance documentary producer living in Brooklyn, NY, she is currently developing projects for series and features.
