Pakistani-Canadian journalist Habiba Nosheen was born in Lahore, the capital city of Pakistan in1982, where she spent her early years. Her family migrated to Toronto Canada as refugees, when she was nine years old.
Growing up in Toronto, Nosheen obtained a bachelors degree from the University of Toronto, a Masters from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and a second Masters degree from York University, Toronto in Women’s Studies.
She started her career in journalism as a reporter at the CBC Radio Pakistan where she was later nominated to report for Kroc Fellowship, on-air for NPR ‘s Morning Edition and All Things Considered.
Nosheen’s successes did not come without the peculiar challenges of a woman of colour, threading the forbidden part of investigative reporting; she started her investigative reporting named, “To Adopt A Child” in 2012, a report that highlighted the story on the murky side of adoptions from Nepal, that left many families caught in the middle. “To Adopt A Child” report earned her the Gracie Award for Outstanding Correspondent and led to a resolution in the Nepalese adoption system after the Nepalese Government acknowledged the irregularities in the adoption system.
Nosheen further delved into film production in 2013, where she successfully co-directed and produced the award-winning documentary Outlawed, shot in Pakistan. The film follows Kainat Soomro, a Pakistani woman who was gang-raped at the age of 13 and struggled to obtain justice. Nosheen’s narration of Outlawed was aired on PBS Frontline and was awarded the Emmy for Outstanding Research. Outlawed, also premiered at the Sundance Film Festival where it was called “among the standouts” of Sundance by The Los Angeles Times, and also earned Nosheen the David A. Andelman and Pamela Title Award by The Overseas Press Club which honors “the best international reporting in the broadcast media showing a concern for the human condition.”
Nosheen has continued to produce groundbreaking pieces highlighting the struggles of disadvantaged people since the documentary Outlawed. Her other works include the radio documentary “What Happened at Dos Erres?” The piece put together details of the 1982 massacre of a village in Guatemala, which had only two known survivors; partly by tracking down the men responsible for the killings and interviewing them about what happened that day.
The documentary was tagged “a masterpiece of storytelling” by the New Yorker and it won her various awards including; The George Foster Peabody Award, The Dart Award for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma, The Third Coast Radio Award, The New York Radio Festival Award and two Overseas Press Club Awards in addition to being a finalist for The Livingston Award for Young Journalists.
Her achievements have continued to soar as she joined 60 Minutes on CBS News in 2014, and was nominated for the Emmy Award. Nosheen’s documentaries have received various supports from The Fund for Investigative Journalism, The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund and the Independent Television Service (ITVS).
A happy mother of two lovely children, Nosheen has been widely published across the United States and the Middle East.
She co-hosts of Canada’s leading investigative news-magazine show, “The Fifth Estate’’ Canada’s and currently teaches journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She articulates four different languages ─ English, Urdu, Hindi, and Punjabi.
Comments are closed.