Michelle Shephard
Michelle Shephard is an award-winning journalist, author, and Emmy-nominated filmmaker. For the last 15 years she has traveled the world as the Toronto Star’s National Security correspondent, making repeated trips, among elsewhere, to Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and more than two dozens trips to the world’s most famous jail in Guantanamo Bay.
Shephard has won Canada’s top journalism’s prizes – a three-time recipient of the National Newspaper Award and was part of a team that received the Governor General’s Michener Award for Public Service Journalism. She is the author of Guantanamo's Child: The Untold Story of Omar Khadr (2008) and Decade of Fear: Reporting from Terrorism's Grey Zone (2011) and is widely published elsewhere including The New Yorker, Foreign Policy Magazine, The Guardian and The New Republic.
Shephard has collaborated on various documentaries, co-directing and producing the Emmy-nominated Guantanamo's Child, which made its world premiere at TIFF in 2015. She produced the award-winning National Film Board's documentary Uyghurs: Prisoners of the Absurd, which premiered at Amsterdam's IDFA in November 2014 and was an associate producer and consultant on the Oscar-nominated and Peabody Award winning documentary Under Fire: Journalists in Combat.
Shephard is on the Board of Directors of the Canadian Journalism Forum on Violence and Trauma. She was awarded the 2015/2016 Atkinson Fellowship, and spent a year investigating her series "Generation 9/11" on the rise of ISIS foreign fighters.
Shephard has won Canada’s top journalism’s prizes – a three-time recipient of the National Newspaper Award and was part of a team that received the Governor General’s Michener Award for Public Service Journalism. She is the author of Guantanamo's Child: The Untold Story of Omar Khadr (2008) and Decade of Fear: Reporting from Terrorism's Grey Zone (2011) and is widely published elsewhere including The New Yorker, Foreign Policy Magazine, The Guardian and The New Republic.
Shephard has collaborated on various documentaries, co-directing and producing the Emmy-nominated Guantanamo's Child, which made its world premiere at TIFF in 2015. She produced the award-winning National Film Board's documentary Uyghurs: Prisoners of the Absurd, which premiered at Amsterdam's IDFA in November 2014 and was an associate producer and consultant on the Oscar-nominated and Peabody Award winning documentary Under Fire: Journalists in Combat.
Shephard is on the Board of Directors of the Canadian Journalism Forum on Violence and Trauma. She was awarded the 2015/2016 Atkinson Fellowship, and spent a year investigating her series "Generation 9/11" on the rise of ISIS foreign fighters.