About
Singeli Agnew is a Peabody and Emmy award-winning director, writer and cinematographer with more than 15 years' experience in innovative television and documentary work. She's covered stories in some of the most challenging environments one can take a camera and her films have been honored with some of the highest awards in journalism.
Most recently, she directed CITIZEN NATION, a four-part series for PBS that grapples with democracy through the eyes of American high school students. The series was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and deemed "the antidote to every show you’ve seen about teens lately." It was awarded "Best Episodic Series" by the International Documentary Association in 2025.
From 2018 - 2020, she was Supervising Producer for The Weekly, helping launch The New York Times' first original tv-documentary series, broadcast on FX and Hulu. Matching top reporters with some of the best producers/directors and cinematographers in the business, the show set a new bar for investigative television. The Weekly's first season garnered nine Emmy nominations - winning five of those - and an Overseas Press Club Edward R. Murrow award.
Before that, Singeli was a cinematographer and producer for the HBO nightly news series Vice News Tonight, responsible for driving coverage from their Middle East Bureau. She covered the fall of Isis-controlled Mosul, the on-going war in Afghanistan, conflict in Gaza and the West Bank, and made two trips to Iran for the series. Her work there received six Emmy nominations - including two nominations and a win for her camera work in Mosul - as well as an Overseas Press Club Award and a Murrow Award.
From 2011-2016 Singeli was a principle cinematographer for Al Jazeera's flagship current affairs show, Fault Lines. Haiti in a Time of Cholera, with correspondent Sebastian Walker, was awarded a Peabody in 2014 for it's "courageous investigation into an international health scandal." Soon after the film's release, the United Nations made a public apology for its role in Haiti's cholera outbreak. She shot or produced dozens more 30-minute documentaries for the program, covering the war in South Sudan, the US-Mexico border and the long fall-out of the United States' post-9/11 foreign policy.
Other collaborations have included several films with director Steven Okazaki - including the Oscar-nominated HBO documentary The Conscience of Nhem En - and development work on Pete Nicks' first film in his Oakland trilogy, The Waiting Room. Singeli spent a month at sea documenting a crew sailing an experimental catamaran from San Francisco to Sydney, has filmed with virtual reality cameras on remote disintegrating glaciers, and shot several films from the backs of horses.
Singeli began her career as a still photographer, covering daily news, environmental and political stories in Montana and Northern New Mexico for some of the best newspapers in the region. She currently is based between Washington DC and New York City.
US cell: 1-202-660-2478
singeli@singeli.com