Francesca Trianni is an investigative journalist and filmmaker.
Her work has been shown and exhibited at art galleries, at film festivals and at institutions around the world, including the DOC NYC Film Festival, the Fotografiska Museum in New York and the Taormina Film Festival in Italy.
Most recently, Francesca received a Chicken & Egg development grant for her reporting on the rise of cybermercenaries. She also served as a senior editorial producer at Vice News, where she produced long-form documentaries. Francesca spent nearly a year investigating an automotive supplier that knowingly released PFAS, also known as forever chemicals, into the environment. This reporting culminated in a one-hour VICE Special Report, “Toxic Farmland,” which was nominated for a news Emmy.
Previously, Francesca spent nearly a decade at TIME, where she directed and filmed Paradise Without People, an award-winning feature-length documentary that follows two pregnant Syrian refugees as they navigate motherhood in a Greek refugee camp. The film, a feature debut from TIME Studios, screened internationally at festivals, including Big Sky and the Stockholm Film Festival, and won Best Documentary at the Taormina and AmDocs festivals.
In 2018, Francesca filmed and produced Finding Home, a multimedia interactive project that won more than a dozen awards, including the World Press Photo Award for Innovative Storytelling, the RTNDA Edward R. Murrow Awards, the POYi contest, and received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding New Approaches in Documentary.
Francesca is an adjunct professor at the Columbia Journalism School, where she graduated with honors. She has also been a guest speaker and mentor for dozens of storytelling programs, including the Video Consortium's 2021 Sony Mentorship Program, the International Center of Photography, and the Mountain Workshops.