About

Jeff Arak is a journalist and filmmaker based in New York City. Over the past decade he has shot and produced non-fiction TV and documentaries for HBO and PBS. His new short film “The Fly Collectors” documents efforts by local community members in Senegal to eliminate river blindness by using themselves as human bait. The film has screened in 2024 at the Dublin International Film Festival, the New York African Film Festival as well as the Hamptons International Film Festival. Also in 2024, Arak produced “A Dangerous Assignment: Uncovering Corruption in Maduro’s Venezuela” which aired on the longest running and most prestigious documentary series in the U.S., PBS Frontline. The film traces an investigation by the Venezuelan media outlet Armando.info over seven years and four continents as they pursue the corrupt contractor, Alex Saab. “A Dangerous Assignment” will have its European premiere at Press Play Prague.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Arak produced the Emmy-award winning news series AXIOS on HBO. For two seasons, Arak covered the spread of Covid in Asia, the 2020 elections, the decline of unions in America, trends in transportation and the psychology of Trump rallies among other topics.

In 2017, Arak co-produced “Life on Parole” also on Frontline. The film earned a Media for a Just Society Award and helped Frontline win the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards’ highest honor: the Gold Baton; awarded for the first time in ten years.

Arak is a graduate of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY where he focused on International reporting. He has a B.A. in anthropology from Brandeis University. He speaks Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.