Ahmed Shihab-Eldin


Ahmed Shihab-Eldin is an American-born Kuwaiti journalist, actor and media personality of Palestinian descent.
WWW ahmedshihabeldin.com𝕏 ASE

Career

He formerly worked at Huffington Post, The New York Times and Vice, and was a senior reporter for Al Jazeera Plus from 2017 through 2020. He produced several documentaries for Wide Angle on PBS and others for Vice on HBO.
In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, he began moving towards other creative pursuits, creating a parody account on the short video platform TikTok and suggesting that he might begin podcasting. He replied, in character, to a video by the Instagram and YouTube star Faiza Rammuny and it went viral, launching this leg of his career. He published his first book, Demanding Dignity, in 2021.
In 2023, he produced and presented an investigative documentary Queer Egypt Under Attack for BBC News focussing on the treatment of LGBT people in Egypt.

Awards and recognition

In 2008, he won a Webby Award for master's digital media project, "Defining Middle Ground: The Next Generation of Muslim New Yorkers."
In 2023 he won an Amnesty International UK Media Award in Digital Creativity for his documentary Queer Egypt Under Attack, which also earned him a British Journalism Award for Social Affairs, Diversity & Inclusion.
In December 2024, he shared Amnesty International Australia's inaugural Human Rights Defender Award with Palestinian journalists Bisan Owda, Plestia Alaqad, and Anas Al-Sharif for "the significant impact of their fearless reporting on the alleged genocide in Gaza, their innovative use of social media and citizen journalism to challenge traditional narratives and their ability to inspire action for justice."