ProPublica announced Tuesday that Almudena Toral will be joining the newsroom’s staff as its first executive producer for video. She will oversee ProPublica’s documentary film department, from the creation of original stories across a variety of formats and platforms to distributing them with new production partners.
Toral comes to ProPublica from Univision, where she leads an award-winning team of enterprise journalists and filmmakers. Her film “Fear in Trump Territory” won a news and documentary Emmy in 2018. A year later, she won World Press Photo’s online video of the year award and another Emmy for her film “The Legacy of the ‘Zero Tolerance’ Policy: Traumatized Children with No Access to Treatment.” She and her team produced “America First: The Legacy of an Immigration Raid,” a documentary that was recognized in 2019 by the Gabo Prize, one of the top journalism awards in Latin America.
Toral’s work has also been honored with two Edward R. Murrow Awards, a Hillman Award for web journalism, a JFK Human Rights Journalism Prize and multiple other documentary and photography honors from Pictures of the Year International, National Press Photographers Association Best of Photojournalism and PDN Photo Annual, among others.
A native of Madrid, Toral previously taught video storytelling at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, and she worked for The New York Times’ digital video team as well as for TIME. She has also freelanced for The Guardian, Al Jazeera and the television channel Canal+. Toral is a TED fellow, a Carter fellow and an Ochberg fellow at the Dart Center at Columbia University.
“Over the past two years at ProPublica, we’ve increased our focus on long-form documentary film, and Almudena is the perfect leader to take those efforts even further,” ProPublica Editor-in-Chief Stephen Engelberg said. “With her exceptional skill in both creative filmmaking and powerful journalism, we look forward to working with her to reach new audiences and tell more imaginative stories.”
“I am thrilled I’ll be joining ProPublica and working alongside so many investigative reporters and editors I admire,” Toral said. “Films have a unique power to generate empathy, humanize complex issues and spur impact. Now more than ever we need the hard-hitting investigative work of ProPublica to reach a diverse public and influence conversations nationally and globally.”
