Hi! If you’re here, you already know I’m Yara El Murr.

I’m an award-winning journalist and emerging documentary filmmaker living between Beirut and Toronto. In my work, I’ve covered climate, migration, labor, health and Lebanon’s reckoning with the civil war’s legacy.

I’m also a co-founder of kotobli.com, check it out for cool book reccommendations for and from the SWANA region.

Teaching & Editing

I recently joined The Green Line Toronto where I lead the Alexandra Park Youth Journalism Project, a four months program for young people interested in community journalism. I designed and taught four workshops on interviewing, video, writing and editing skills. I also oversee the youth in our “Engagement Outpost,” a space where we invite community members to chat about their media needs and local news. Throughout summer 2024, I will be guiding them through reporting assignments and editing their video and written work, along with the work of The Green Line’s team members.

Reporting & Writing

At The Public Source, a Beirut-based independent media organization, I worked on in-depth features and investigations, made video stories, and helped run our social media accounts. I recently published a 3-part investigation about the human cost of border enforcement, which has received AMEJA’s Best Coverage of the MENA Award 2023 and was shortlisted for the Fetisov Journalism Award in the Contribution to Civil Rights category. I’ve written about climate change’s impact on agriculture, matriarchs’ foraging practices, the dark side of Lebanon’s solar energy, healthcare workers, disaster preparedness, and more. I was honored to receive the Young Journalist of the Year Award 2023, presented by the Thomson Foundation and the Foreign Press Association in the UK.

I’ve also written about nurse-led climate action in clinics & hospitals for The Guardian, the need for non-Western therapy approaches for Newlines Magazine, refugees’ health & wellbeing for The New Arab. On a more science-y note, I’ve written and edited several stories for Scheherazade Speaks Science.

Documentary work

I worked as an assistant producer & research consultant on The Soil and the Sea (dir. Daniele Rugo, 2023), a documentary about disappearances and mass graves from the Lebanese Civil War.

I was also an associate producer, assistant editor, and occasional videographer on the documentary We Never Left (dir. Loulwa Khoury) which follows Lebanese immigrants in New York as they navigate Lebanon’s uprising & collapse from abroad.

In March 2022, my first film Reverberations (which I directed and edited), premiered at the Beirut International Women Film Festival. This short documentary essay explores the civil war’s impact on my family through an intimate mother-daughter portrait that unveils the politics of a country going through a painful reckoning with its cyclical history.

I’ve also produced, filmed, and edited short videos for news outlets and artists, including a video story about an Arabic percussion workshop in NYC for City Limits, and others.

Other projects

I’m a co-founder of kotobli, a book discovery platform & database for books by & about the SWANA region. We recently received our first grant from Culture Resource to offer small Arab publishers the tools and help they need to establish a strong and safe digital presence. We curate reading recommendations that highlight themes and authors from the region who don’t get the recognition they deserve.

I’ve also built the Lebanon Memory Archive, a multimedia website collecting testimonies and projects related to the histories of violence in Lebanon, and the Landscapes of Memories & Violence, a website that displays photo projects that interrogates landscapes that have been sites of violence in Italy and Lebanon.

In the summer of 2020, I was an intern on the production team of Radical Media where I worked on outreach and crowdsourcing for PBS American Portrait and edited reels for social media.

I’m a member of the Canadian Association of Journalists, the Documentary Organization of Canada, the Marie Colvin Journalist Network, the Oxford Climate Journalism Network, and the Brown Girls Doc Mafia. I’m a Fulbright alumna, and graduated with a Masters in Journalism from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

In a previous life, I studied biology and psychology at the Lebanese American University, ran the astronomy club for two years, and worked in genetics and pathology labs.