Ilie Mitaru is an Emmy-nominated photojournalist and documentary filmmaker whose work centers on regular people in extraordinary circumstances: American cowboys brought to rural Russia to help restart the country’s beef industry; renegade farmers building their own wildfire defense rigs; a lone auto mechanic traversing miles of desert borderland with jugs of water to save his fellow migrants, Ilie’s stories create empathy and a connection to what at first might appear foreign, but ultimately proves universal.

Ilie’s films and photography have been featured in The New York Times, National Geographic, BBC, The Guardian, among others. A first generation Romanian-American whose parents received political asylum during the Cold War, Ilie is drawn to stories that strive for a more complex understanding of the individuals and communities centered in his work.