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Singeli Agnew

Washington, District of Columbia, United States
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singeliagnew
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Bio

Over the past 15 years Singeli Agnew has worked as a cinematographer, producer and director on films and series for HBO, Showtime, Netflix, National Geographic, PBS and others in more than 50 countries and in some of the most challenging environments one can take a camera.

From 2018 - 2020, she was Supervising Producer for The Weekly, helping launch The New York Times' first original tv-documentary series, broadcast on FX and Hulu. She wrote and directed four films for the series and helped guide the visual look for the show. The Weekly's first season garnered nine Emmy nominations - winning five of those - and an Overseas Press Club Edward R. Murrow award.

Before that, Singeli was a cinematographer and producer for the HBO nightly news series oVice News Tonight, helping run their Middle East Bureau. She covered the fall of Isis-controlled Mosul, the on-going war in Afghanistan, the Great March of Return in Gaza, and made two trips to Iran for the series. Her work there garnered six Emmy nominations - including two nominations and a win for her camera work in Mosul - as well as an Overseas Press Club Award and a Murrow Award.

From 2011-2016 Singeli was a principle cinematographer for Al Jazeera's flagship current affairs show, Fault Lines. She shot and produced more than two dozen 30-minute documentaries for the program. Haiti in a Time of Cholera, with correspondent Sebastian Walker, charted the UN's cover-up of its deadly role in the cholera outbreak and was awarded a Peabody in 2014. Soon after the film's release, the UN apologized for its role in the outbreak. In 2016, in another collaboration with Walker, she tracked down survivors of the CIA's torture program in Pakistan, Libya, Belgium and Afghanistan, unearthing previously undocumented abuses and failures of intelligence by the secretive interrogation program.

Other collaborations have included several films with director Steven Okazaki - including the Oscar-nominated HBO documentary The Conscience of Nhem En - and development work on Pete Nicks' first film in his Oakland trilogy, The Waiting Room. Singeli spent a month at sea documenting a crew sailing an experimental catamaran from San Francisco to Sydney, has filmed with virtual reality cameras on remote disintegrating glaciers, and shot several films from the backs of horses.

Singeli began her career as a still photographer, covering daily news, environmental and political stories in Montana and Northern New Mexico for some of the best newspapers in the region. She currently is based between Washington DC and New York City, though her heart still resides in the West. She prefers to work with a light footprint, shoot most of her work handheld, and seeks to find that constant balance between reverence and bravery.