Matthew Orr

Matthew Orr is an associate professor at Medill. He directs the Medill on the Hill reporting program in Washington D.C. and teaches video and broadcast production.

Orr is an award-winning reporter and filmmaker with more than 20 years of experience in the field. He has dedicated his journalism career to finding ways to create engaging, enlightening, entertaining, and provoking stories that resonate with readers and viewers on an emotional level and transport them deep into the lives of others. He has had the privilege of producing work across varying platforms at organizations with the highest journalistic standards.

Before joining Medill, Orr was the director of multimedia and creative at STAT, a media company at the Boston Globe that tells compelling stories about health, medicine, and scientific discovery. While at STAT, Orr led a multimedia team that won numerous awards, including three Online Journalism Awards, three Webby Awards, a National Headliner Award, and a George Polk Award. Orr also directed Augmented, a feature-length documentary for STAT, that aired on NOVA on PBS in February 2022. The film was nominated for a National News and Documentary Emmy Award in 2023.

Before STAT, Orr was the first full-time staff video journalist at the New York Times and spent 13 years as an award-winning senior video producer and reporter. He reported, produced, shot, and edited breaking news, live video, social video, feature stories, online series, and documentaries. His projects included “The Debt Trap” about the 2008 mortgage crisis; “Portraits Redrawn,” profiles of families affected by the September 11th attacks; “The Last Word,” advanced obit video interviews with prominent personalities that publish upon their death; and “Breakdown,” an investigation of animal abuse in the horse racing industry which was nominated for a National News and Documentary Emmy Award in 2012.

He has reported internationally throughout Asia, Europe, and South America. He also covered the U.S. presidential elections in 2004, 2008 and 2012.