Alina Simone is an award-winning filmmaker and journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Guardian Long Read and Amazon Originals, among many others. She is the recipient of a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship in film and a 2025 Academy Gold Fellowship for Women, awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Her debut documentary, Black Snow, was executive produced by Erin Brockovich and aired on POV (PBS), receiving a nomination for Best Documentary at the 2026 News & Documentary Emmy Awards.  Black Snow has won a dozen awards and honors around the world, including: the FACT Award for best investigative documentary (CPH:DOX); the Sustainable Future Award (Sydney International Film Festival); Best Documentary Feature (AmDocs), and the 2025 Cinema Eye Spotlight Award. Alina’s work has been supported by Catapult Film Fund, Doc Society, IDA Enterprise Production Fund, Justice for Journalists Foundation, Chicken & Egg Films, Film Independent, Redford Center, NYC Women in Film Fund, Abigail Disney and Sara’s Wish Foundation.

In addition to her work in film, Alina is also the author of three books, a novel 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 2017 Village Voice article about America’s first K-pop cram school, “So You Want to be a K-pop Star,” is currently being made into a narrative feature by Paramount Pictures. For 7 years, Alina was a reporter for “The World by PRX,” an international news radio show. She has appeared on the Today Show, PBS NewsHour and RadioLab to discuss her work, and has taught the art of non-fiction writing at Yale University.

Alina 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 Independent).

Born in Soviet Ukraine and raised in Massachusetts, she currently lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

A long time ago, she used to be an indie rock singer.