Exiled Russian journalist Katerina Gordeeva will talk about her work collecting stories from the war in Ukraine and the challenges journalists encounter in reporting about trauma.
Katerina Gordeeva (b. 1977) is one of Russia’s most famous independent journalists. Until 2012, she worked as a TV reporter for the federal television channel NTV. During her time with that channel, she reported from the frontlines of Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Iraq as a war correspondent. She later resigned from the channel due to a disagreement with the channel’s programming agenda.
Gordeeva left Moscow out of protest in 2014, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and seizure of part of Eastern Ukraine. In 2020, she created her own YouTube channel, Tell Gordeeva, which today has more than 1.65 million subscribers. To make her documentary film “Humans At War,” Gordeeva travelled to dozens of refugee shelters in both Europe and Russia. She collected first-person accounts by interviewing people with opposing views about their experiences and how the war had drastically changed their lives. This three-hour testimonial film has been viewed by more than 3 million people. She has subsequently published a book based on these interviews, Take My Grief Away: Voices from the War in Ukraine.
In the summer of 2022, Gordeeva was named as one of the top 10 most influential independent journalists in Russia. She is a five-time winner of the Redcollegia Award, an independent prize that recognizes the work of journalists doing ground-breaking work despite government pressure. Gordeeva was awarded the Anna Politkovskaya International Journalism Prize in August in 2022. In September 2022, the Russian government named Gordeeva a “foreign agent.”
Sponsored by Havighurst Center for East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies and Department of Media, Film, and Journalism
