Benjamin Zand

Benjamin Zand is an award-winning British-Iranian journalist and filmmaker for the BBC from Liverpool, England. He makes and reports on feature videos and documentaries for BBC TV, online and social media and is the head of the BBC's mobile bureau - BBC Pop Up.

During university Benjamin started a travel website and began video production. His first documentary was called Tehrangeles, featuring Iranians living in LA. After finishing his studies, he worked with production companies and eventually became a producer at the BBC World Service working on numerous radio programmes, including BBC World Have Your Say. After about a year, he moved on to BBC World News, as a producer and social media manager of BBC Facebook pages.

Benjamin then became a video journalist and reporter for BBC News, also becoming part of the BBC's video innovation lab. During this time, he covered stories from far-right nationalism to Native Americans in South Dakota. He helped start up BBC Trending and BBC Newsbeat's video offering, and also worked for the BBC Travel Show. Towards the end of 2014, he started the BBC's "mobile-bureau" called BBC Pop Up with a BBC colleague. Here, he travelled across the US crowd-sourcing story ideas and making documentaries for BBC World News and BBC News.

Now, he works as the Editor of BBC Pop Up and as a presenter and filmmaker for different departments across the BBC making current affairs documentaries, including BBC Two, BBC Three and Panorama.

Benjamin was named Young Talent of the Year at the 2016 Royal Television Society Journalism Awards. “The judges liked everything about Benjamin, the stories he’d found, the way he filmed them - normally on his own - and the way he told them. They found him original, fresh, provocative, versatile, and, of course, creative."