Craig Duff

Craig Duff is an Emmy award-winning video journalist and documentary television director, producer and writer. He specializes in multi-platform storytelling and explanatory journalism. In January 2012, Craig was named a professor of journalism at the Medill School at Northwestern University, where he continues to teach.

Prior to joining the faculty at Medill, he was the director of multimedia and chief video journalist for TIME, where he oversaw video and other multimedia projects for the magazine’s digital platforms and TIME.com. In addition to managing and editing content, Craig’s personal works at TIME included a series of films on the Bill of Rights, feature stories on such varied topics as Barbershop Harmony and Demolition Derby, and the editing of several multimedia stories with TIME photographers. He was also a supervising editor on the magazine’s Emmy award-winning cross-platform project Beyond 9/11: Portraits of Resilience.

In 2009, Craig won an Emmy award for new approaches in news and documentary programming for the Iconic Photo series, which he developed and produced at TIME. While working there, Craig was also an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

In the months before he joined TIME, in spring 2008, Craig was a Ferris Professor of Journalism in residence at Princeton University, where he taught a seminar on multi-platform journalism.

He spent the previous year in Egypt, where served as a Knight International Journalism Fellow at the Center for Electronic Journalism at the American University in Cairo. Prior to the fellowship and during his academic appointments, Craig worked with The New York Times as the paper first ventured into video journalism through the expanded use of video on nytimes.com.

In his work and travels, Craig has spent a week on an aircraft carrier during wartime, flown on a training mission in a B-52 bomber, soared in hot air balloons over the Masai Mara and the monuments of Luxor, trekked for 21 days in the Himalayan mountains, eaten crickets in a hill tribe village in northern Thailand, dog sledded in Minnesota and hung out with the orangutans of Borneo.

Craig’s television work includes several documentaries produced with the New York Times, including hour-long programs about the future of the Arctic Ocean (“New York Times Reporting: Arctic Rush”), Homeland Security (“Are Your Safer?” on the Discovery Channel), the ins and outs of political reporting (“Politics and the Media” on the Discovery Times channel), and the sale of looted artifacts in the antiquities trade (“Stolen Treasures,” also on Discovery Times).

In the summer of 2003, he traveled in Iraq for a program on the hunt for Saddam Hussein (“Hunting Saddam,” on The Discovery Channel). Based in Kuwait before and during the recent war in Iraq, Craig was assigned to work with New York Times Chief Military Correspondent Michael Gordon for a series of pieces on the NewsHour on PBS.

“CNN Presents: Summer of Fire,” an inside view into the lives of wildland firefighters as they tackled huge forest fires during the summer of 2002, ran in June and August of 2003 on CNN. Also for CNN, Craig produced “Carrier at War” – an hour-long documentary for CNN’s documentary strand CNN Presents. That program chronicled a week in the life of the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis, as it operated during the war in Afghanistan. A follow-up to that program was “War Birds,” which focused on military aircraft, including the Navy’s newest jet fighter and the Air Force’s oldest bomber, the B-52. He also produced and directed (with Red Sky Productions) “El Lobo: the Song of the Wolf,” a film, hosted by musician Kenny Loggins, about the reintroduction of endangered Mexican gray wolves in the southwestern U.S.

He was the photographer, producer, writer and director of “Global Challenges: Virtual Villages,” a special for CNN International that looked at novel uses of new technologies in the developing world (shot on location in the Dominican Republic, India, Bangladesh, South Africa and Mozambique). Other memorable films and specials include: a documentary about the lingering effects of the defoliant Agent Orange in Vietnam; two programs which delved into the tribal world of tattooing and body art; “Changing our Minds,” a scientific special about the brain and long-term thinking; “Flamingowatch!,” a live wildlife program broadcast from Kenya and co-produced with the BBC and The National Audubon Society; coverage of the United Nations summits on environment and population; and “In Nature’s Wake,” a CNN newsmagazine special about the Mississippi river floods of 1993 (winner of a national Emmy award).

Before his successful freelance years, Craig was as an Executive Producer at CNN in Atlanta, where he co-created and oversaw the production of two cultural newsmagazine series (TOPX on TBS and The American Edge on CNN) as well as various specials.

During nearly 10 years at CNN and Turner Broadcasting, Craig Duff received numerous awards, including a national EMMY, two Cable Ace Awards, the National Headliner Award, a Genesis award, three awards from the Environmental Media Association, and festival honors from the Houston, Chicago, Columbus and National Educational Film Festivals.

His documentary New York Times Reporting: Arctic Rush was awarded the National Association of Science Writers’ 2006 Science and Society Award.

“Ricochet,” a video series he produced (with Stephen Franklin) on gun violence in Chicago, was awarded a Peter Lisagor award from the Chicago Headline Club.

While at Northwestern, Craig continues to freelance for major news organizations including the New York Times (with whom he recently covered the gun violence over Memorial Day Weekend in Chicago), WSJ.com, AJ+ and others.

Craig has earned a Master of Arts degree in Radio, Television and Film from the University of Texas at Austin and a Bachelor of Arts in Speech Communication from Youngstown State University.