BRENT McDONALD, a senior video correspondent at The New York Times, produces short documentaries and narrative-driven news stories for nytimes.com. He’s also produced for The Times’ documentary program, The Weekly, on FX and Hulu. His work has been widely recognized for both reporting and visual storytelling. McDonald currently lives in Mexico City and covers Latin America for the video series The Dispatch.
Since joining The Times in 2005, as a founding member of the newsroom's video operation, McDonald has covered such wide-ranging topics as the business of police body cameras and the plight of coral reefs, the opioid overdose epidemic and Venezuela's economic crisis. He's also a FAA-certified drone pilot. Before coming to The Times, he was an independent documentary producer and cameraman in Oakland, California, working for such venues as PBS Frontline/World, NOVA, and the Times-Discovery Channel.
He has won video awards from World Press Photo, POYi, the Society of Professional Journalists, RTDNA, NPPA and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. His work was twice nominated for a national Emmy. And he has contributed to projects that won the Online Journalism Award, the IRE Medal, the Overseas Press Club Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.
McDonald also writes about and teaches video journalism. He twice served as video instructor at The New York Times’ Student Journalism Institute and has taught courses at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia College in Chicago, and NPPA's Northern Short Course. Born in 1977, McDonald grew up along the Sangamon River in rural Illinois. He studied art history and photography at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and documentary filmmaking at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.