Photo by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
About
Jonah M. Kessel is a visual journalist at The New York Times, based in New York. From 2011 to 2016, he covered Asia for the video desk, working out of the Beijing and Hong Kong bureaus.
He currently leads The Times’s cinematography efforts, managing strategy of aesthetic and technology as well as a team of Times video journalists specializing in camera technologies.
Mr. Kessel’s video journalism is a hybrid of explanatory and investigative short form documentary and other innovative forms of visual journalism.
Mr. Kessel has field experience creating non-fiction films in over 30 countries, including China, North Korea, Cuba, Russia, South Korea, Mongolia, Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar, India, Nepal, Australia, The Netherlands, Romania, Poland, Ecuador, England, Switzerland, Algeria, Madagascar and across the United States of America.
A passionate technical cinematographer, Mr. Kessel has a love for studio production and lighting design. Mr. Kessel runs the Times video studio, a 40” by 24.5” production space at the Times headquarters in midtown Manhattan.
Mr. Kessel is camera-agnostic, fluent in both Canon and Sony camera systems. He is an FAA licensed drone pilot and a trained gimbal operator. He has operational experience with science-based cameras such as the Phantom Flex4k (high speed) and a variety of FLIR cameras (infrared).
In 2013, Mr. Kessel was part of the team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting “for its penetrating look into business practices by Apple and other technology companies that illustrates the darker side of a changing global economy for workers and consumers."
In 2019, Mr. Kessel was part of a team whose coverage of the Trump administration's war on science, "including the systematic dismantling of federal regulations and policy," was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
Mr. Kessel is a World Press Photo winner. He has four times been named a Multimedia Journalist of the Year from Pictures of the Year International (POYi), has been awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Justice and Human Rights Reporting and the Innovative Storytelling Award from the National Press Foundation.
Regardless of what state or country he lives in, Mr. Kessel identifies as a Vermonter.