Kevin McKiernan is an American foreign correspondent, photographer and documentary filmmaker.[1][2][3][4]
McKiernan's work, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize,[5] has taken him to some of the world's most troubled regions, from Nicaragua to Iraq and Syria,[6] from West Africa to Afghanistan.[7][8] He has been widely published in national and international media.[8][9][10] An expert on the Kurds,[11][12] St. Martin's Press released his book, THE KURDS: A People in Search of Their Homeland. McKiernan wrote and directed the PBS documentary Good Kurds, Bad Kurds, which The New York Times called "searing."[13] It won the Human Rights Prize at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.[14] In addition to Good Kurds, Bad Kurds, McKiernan co-produced the documentary The Spirit of Crazy Horse for PBS Frontline.[8] In 2011, he completed Bringing King to China, a documentary that premiered at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.[15][16][17][18] Ethnic Cleansing: The Story of the Rohingya,[19] a short film, premiered at the Ojai Film Festival in November 2014.[20] His newest documentary film, From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock: A Reporter's Journey, was released on October 8, 2019.[19] A review in The New Republic called it "a humane but unflinching look at one of the most famous Indigenous resistance groups in modern history."[21] The film features previously unreleased footage from Wounded Knee that McKiernan "buried before his arrest by the FBI at the siege’s conclusion."[22] Cinematographer Haskell Wexler filmed much of the contemporary footage[22]
Education and personal life
McKiernan holds a J.D. from Northeastern University Law School and a B.A. in English Literature from the University of St. Thomas. He was also awarded an Honorary M.S. from the Brooks Institute of Photography, and received a Master's Certificate from the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma. He is an Ochberg Fellow at the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma.[23] McKiernan is a son of the late Eoin McKiernan, one of the early major scholars of the field of Irish Studies.[24][25][26]