Bearing Witness: Empathy, Ethics & Spaces Between Journalism & Documentary

Pailin Wedel is a Thai-American journalist and Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker based in Bangkok, Thailand.

She directed two Netflix Originals: Hope Frozen — winner of Thailand’s first International Emmy and Hot Docs’ Best International Feature Documentary — and The Trapped 13: How We Survived the Thai Cave, nominated for a News & Documentary Emmy in 2023.

With a background in journalism, she has reported and hosted for Al Jazeera’s 101 East, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and National Geographic. Raised across Asia and rooted in Thailand, Pailin has spent over a decade telling complex, human-centered stories from the region.

Her presentation — "Bearing Witness: Empathy, Ethics and Spaces Between Journalism and Documentary" — is part of UNC Hussman's Visual Communication Alumni-in-Residence Series created in honor of Mary Jane Price and Annie Cone Liptzin, alumnae who volunteered for nearly a decade to assist with the darkroom, equipment checkout and other needs of the UNC Hussman visual journalism program beginning in the 1980s.