About Alina Simone
Alina Simone is an award-winning filmmaker, journalist and author whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, NPR, The Guardian Long Read, Slate, The Village Voice, California Sunday, and Amazon Originals, among many others. Her debut documentary feature, Black Snow, won the FACT award for best investigative documentary at CPH:DOX 2024 and the Sustainable Future Award at the 2024 Sydney International Film Festival. She is the author of three books, a novel and and an essay collection both published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Madonnaland (University of Texas Press) a collection of music criticism that Rolling Stone named one of the top ten music books of the year. Her Village Voice feature about America’s first K-pop cram school, “So You Want to be a K-pop Star,” was optioned for film by 20th Century Fox. For 7 years, Alina was a regular contributor to the nightly news radio show PRI’s “The World” (a co-production of the BBC). She has taught non-fiction writing at Yale University.
Alina’s work has been supported by: Catapult Film Fund, Doc Society, Chicken and Egg Films, Justice for Journalists Foundation, IDA Enterprise Fund, The Redford Center, Fork Films, NYC Women in Film Fund, Bloomberg Philanthropies and Sara’s Wish Foundation. She is the recipient of a Logan Non-Fiction Fellowship, the Andrew Berends Film Fellowship, an NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, the Mountainfilm Emerging Filmmaker Fellowship and the Cayton-Goldrich Family Foundation Fellowship (awarded by Film Indepedent).
Born in Soviet Ukraine and raised in Massachusetts, Alina currently lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.
A long time ago, she used to be an indie rock singer.