Email: [email protected], Twitter: @vedashastri, Instagram: @shastriveda
Veda Shastri is currently Senior Producer, Immersive Experiences at National Geographic. In this role she produces, edits and commissions feature storytelling and video stories at National Geographic Magazine. She also produces XR storytelling for National Geographic.
She was earlier a staff video journalist and producer for The New York Times in New York. Veda has produced over 100 virtual reality stories and short documentaries for the New York Times, from the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, inside a Black Hawk in Puerto Rico, the lava fields of Iceland, and on Mauna Loa Volcano in Hawaii.
Her work at the NYTimes also includes the interactive project and documentary, “Remembering Emmett Till: The Legacy of a Lynching”, “Dark Island: Rebuilding Puerto Rico’s Power Grid,” a travelogue from a road trip, “52 Places to Go: Iceland,” the series “Genocide’s Legacy,” coverage of the Rohingya refugees, and an interactive from inside Fukushima, Japan.
For her work at the NYTimes, she has won an Online Journalism Award and an Edward R. Murrow Award.
Prior to joining the Times, Veda co-directed the VR documentary, “Return to Chernobyl” for PBS Frontline, which was nominated for an Online Journalism Award. Veda is the director of the 2017 documentary short, “Ladies Only.” She worked as a news producer at CNN-IBN, a television news channel headquartered in New Delhi, for 5 years, producing live news bulletins and special programming.
Hailing from Boston, she has an MA from New York University’s Journalism and Documentary Film program, and a BA in Anthropology from Tufts University.