William Wheeler is an award-winning investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker. He’s interviewed Honduran hitmen about the murder of Indigenous activist Berta Cáceres; covered the Arab Spring migration crisis and the rise of Europe’s far right; and traveled from Himalayan Nepal though Pakistan to the Bay of Bengal to document the impacts of climate change on a quarter of the world’s population.

 

Wheeler was a part of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting team that won a National Press Club award for coverage of the failed international rebuilding effort in Haiti, and reporting on tensions between nuclear rivals over the Indus River won the Earth Journalism Award at the Copenhagen climate summit. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, Foreign Affairs, USA Today, McSweeney's Quarterly, and other outlets. 

 

As a documentary producer, he led Chinese artist Ai Weiwei through the Middle East for Human Flow, his feature film about the global refugee crisis; originated and developed stories and did on-the-ground investigations that powered Netflix’s Emmy-winning music series Remastered, as well as Showtime's Emmy-winning migration series The Trade, National Geographic Film’s International Documentary Award- and Emmy-winning feature documentary The First Wave, and Meltdown, Netflix’s International Documentary Award-winning investigative series about the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island.  

 

Wheeler is also the author of the book State of War: MS-13 and El Salvador's World of Violence, which took him into the realm of spies, sicarios, dirty cops, and gang members to expose how failed American policies and corruption at the highest levels of the Salvadoran state contributed to Central America’s migration crisis. Wheeler has a BA in English from UC Berkeley and master’s degrees in journalism and international affairs from Columbia University. 

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