Deeyah Khan

Deeyah Khan is a documentary filmmaker and human rights activist whose empathetic, unflinching approach to storytelling has earned her two Emmy Awards, two Peabody Awards, a BAFTA, and an RTS Award for Best Director. As founder of Fuuse, a media company amplifying the voices of women, minorities, and third-culture communities, and UNESCO's first Goodwill Ambassador for Artistic Freedom and Creativity, she has created over seven award-winning films exploring extremism, reproductive rights, and violence against women. Her work equips audiences with powerful insights into conflict resolution through empathy-based dialogue, demonstrating how deep listening and recognising shared humanity can bridge social and ideological divides in polarised times.

When Deeyah Khan attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville to film neo-Nazis for her documentary White Right: Meeting the Enemy, she chose empathy over confrontation, a decision that would earn her a second Emmy Award and redefine how documentary filmmaking can bridge ideological divides. Born in Norway to parents of Pashtun and Punjabi heritage, her lived experience of navigating multiple cultures informs every frame of her work. She founded Fuuse, a media and arts company dedicated to amplifying the voices of women, minorities and third-culture communities who tell their own stories rather than having them told for them. In 2016, she became UNESCO's first Goodwill Ambassador for Artistic Freedom and Creativity, a role that recognises her commitment to defending expression in its most vulnerable forms.

Deeyah has won over thirty major international awards across a decade of filmmaking, including two Emmy Awards, two Peabody Awards, a BAFTA and a Royal Television Society Award for Best Factual Director. Her debut film Banaz: A Love Story chronicled the honour killing of a young British Kurdish woman and the detective who fought to bring her family to justice, earning both an Emmy and a Peabody. Her subsequent films, Jihad and Muslim in Trump's America, involved years of careful relationship-building with Islamic extremists and communities targeted by rising Islamophobia. In 2021, she won her first BAFTA for America's War on Abortion, which examined the erosion of reproductive rights during the Trump administration. She has since directed Behind the Rage: America's Domestic Violence, meeting perpetrators to understand the roots of violence against women. Through Fuuse, she also launched sister-hood, a digital platform spotlighting nearly 200 writers from forty countries of Muslim heritage, and produced Listen to the Banned, an album featuring persecuted musicians worldwide.

Deeyah's approach to conflict resolution through listening and empathy has made her a sought-after speaker at international forums including the United Nations and Red Table Talk alongside Jada Pinkett Smith. Her method centres on recognising shared humanity even in the most polarised conversations, a skill honed through years of filming on society's most volatile frontlines. Audiences leave her presentations with practical frameworks for navigating division, understanding how deep listening can dismantle prejudice and build connection across ideological boundaries. She equips organisations and individuals with tools to move beyond surface-level dialogue, demonstrating that transformation begins when we turn up the volume on voices too often silenced and recognise that everyone, as she learned from Banaz's story, deserves to be seen, heard and loved.