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About Me

INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST

Giovanni Ulleri is an award-winning freelance Senior Shooting Producer/Director with a distinguished international track record across documentary, factual, current affairs, and news programming.
He has worked extensively for all major UK broadcasters, including BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Arabic, ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5, as well as internationally for Al Jazeera English. His US broadcast credits include National Geographic, Discovery Channel, HGTV, The Living Channel, and A&E.

Giovanni specialises in complex, sensitive, and high-risk productions, frequently involving vulnerable contributors, hostile environments, or issues of acute public interest. His work depends on trust, access, and rigorous editorial judgement, and he has secured major international exclusives that have led to front-page news coverage.
He has extensive overseas filming experience in volatile and logistically challenging locations and has self-shot documentaries in Ethiopia, Kenya, Lebanon, Morocco, Namibia, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Thailand, Cambodia, India, South Korea, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. He is highly experienced in diplomatic negotiation, risk management, and operating safely in hostile environments.

For National Geographic’s Drugs, Inc., Giovanni filmed three documentaries in Baltimore, Miami, and Boston, securing rare access to senior US drug dealers and traffickers and persuading them to speak candidly about the realities of the drugs trade.
His work is defined by strong narrative storytelling underpinned by editorial integrity and sound journalistic judgement. A documentary he directed in Ciudad Juárez was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2014 for Outstanding Investigative Journalism in Spanish.

Giovanni is highly experienced in live rolling news and fast-turnaround production, including extensive work for Channel 4 News. A film he wrote and produced on the Somalia Olympic middle-distance team training in Mogadishu won a Royal Television Society (RTS) Award and was shortlisted for the Foreign Press Awards. He is also an RTS Award winner for undercover investigations and a former Local Government Journalist of the Year. On three occasions, he has been honoured to be selected as a judge for the prestigious Royal Television Society Journalism Awards.

His feature documentary credits include serving as the UK Producer on the Oscar-nominated feature documentary Sicko, directed by Michael Moore, and working on The C-Word, a feature documentary examining cancer, with the same producing team.

Through his own production company, Giovanni has series-produced and directed films for the Rory Peck Trust, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Peace Project, as well as short-form commercial films for Ford Motor Company.

He is an experienced self-shooting director working across a wide range of broadcast- approved camera formats and owns broadcast-standard equipment. He is a trained covert- filming operator, holds Hostile Environment and Emergency First Aid Training (HEFAT), and regularly teaches undercover filming techniques.

Giovanni is fluent in Italian, has a working knowledge of French and Spanish, is trained on iNews, and has extensive television studio experience. In 2018, he designed and delivered a four-day documentary filmmaking workshop for emerging filmmakers at the Sarajevo Film Festival.