Lila Hassan ‘16 Earns Investigative Reporting Fellowship

The former Brooklyn College Scholars Program student will spend a year investigating ICE arrests and accountability. 

Lila Hassan '16 was in the 11th grade, living in Cairo, and had just gotten a Blackberry when the uprising began in late January 2011. She quickly realized that what she was seeing on Egyptian state television was the complete opposite of what was unfolding on the streets. So she did what came naturally—she documented the Egyptian revolution one tweet and blog post at a time.

"I was obsessed with cross-comparing coverage," she says. "I realized how deeply I cared about documenting history and making sure falsehoods were corrected."

Hassan was also sympathetic to the cause of the revolution. It was a time period that ultimately cemented Hassan’s parallel passions in human rights and journalism. Those passions would drive her academic pursuits—through a bachelor’s degree in political science from Brooklyn College and then on to a master’s in investigative journalism from Columbia University—culminating most recently when she landed the 2021 Ida B. Wells Fellowship for investigative journalists.

The award comes with a $20,000 stipend to cover reporting costs for a year-long project in which she will also get intensive editorial feedback, legal counsel, research resources, mentoring, story placement, and publicity assistance. The fellowship was created to develop a pipeline of investigative reporters of color who bring diverse backgrounds, experiences, and interests to their work. Hassan plans to report on accountability within the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

The former Brooklyn College Scholars Program student, Gilman Scholar, and BC Excelsior staff member has reported in countries across the globe, from France—where she worked for Reporters Without Borders during the infamous 2015 shooting at the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo (and was featured in a Voice of America story about undeterred Americans)—to Turkey, where she covered the crackdown of an LGBTQ pride parade.

Soon after leaving Brooklyn College, she ended up back home in Cairo working for Thompson Reuters, thanks to help from another illustrious journalism alumnus, Myron Kandel ‘52, whom she met through the Magner Career Center.

She then returned to New York to dip her toe in the human rights work that had always tugged at her, becoming the senior Middle East and North Africa associate at Human Rights Watch. After getting a full scholarship to Columbia University’s Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism, she ended up back in school.

She’s now at PBS’s Frontline in New York, having worked on documentaries about the rise of far-right extremism and voting rights.

"I don’t think I’ve ever lost touch with that innocent, bright-eyed little girl who first started blogging back in Cairo," she says. "My dream is to affect change through my work. If I could do that with just one story, I would be happy."