Shadi Rahimi is a Peabody and Emmy-award winning Executive Producer of short-form news documentaries. Her over two decades of media expertise includes leading innovation efforts and being at the forefront of the digital media landscape.
In 2005 Shadi received her graduate degree in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley and promptly moved to New York to join a team that had launched The New York Times' web reporting efforts. She was later hired by The Santa Rosa Press Democrat to launch their online news desk and train their print journalists to embrace web-first publishing.
In 2011 Shadi moved to Cairo, Egypt during the revolution, where she worked as a freelance photographer and journalist, a copy editor for an English-language Egyptian newspaper, and a documentary filmmaker, while also managing a team for an award-winning online documentary platform.
In 2014 she helped launch the app for AJ+, leading a social media team that built its groundbreaking digital media strategy, becoming in its first year a top news video publisher on Facebook. At the same time, Shadi innovated reporting in the field with a mobile-first broadcasting strategy and was among the first journalists to go live on Facebook – reporting live from the refugee crisis in Europe and in Palestine.
Shadi has been a manager in varying capacities for over a decade. She established a documentary team at AJ+ that produces the Peabody, Emmy and Edward R. Murrow-award winning show "Direct From." She is a member of the ONA-Poynter Institute Leadership Academy for Women in Digital Media and has received the Kathryn Davis Fellowship for Peace, Chips Quinn Fellowship and Middlebury Fellowship in Environmental Journalism. In 2016 she was awarded Al Jazeera's top honor for her work innovating the media landscape.
Shadi has been a media strategist for nearly two decades and has been hired by universities and organizations including the Poynter Institute to lead trainings, hold lectures, present work and speak on panels. Her experience with media training dates back to 2002 with her co-founding of a nonprofit organization that today continues to train Native American youth in media.
