Jigar Mehta – Mehta is a digital entrepreneur, video journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He co-created the crowd-sourced website documentary “18 Days in Egypt,” a collection of stories about the ongoing Egyptian revolution. Mehta is also the co-founder of GroupStream, an online collaborative storytelling platform.
Jigar received his Masters in Journalism from the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley where he studied under documentary filmmaker Jon Else. At Berkeley, Jigar developed a passion for character-driven stories and built the journalistic skills necessary to ensure those stories were both interesting and authentic.
Jigar was previously with The New York Times as a video journalist. The in-house unit produced micro-documentaries for the website. Jigar was influential in pushing the boundaries of the form. He regularly teamed up with the multimedia team to produce stories that could only be uniquely told using video and the web and he contributed to multimedia pieces such as the Simmons Flip, which was nominated for a News and Documentary Emmy for New Approaches.
Jigar currently splits his time between New York, Cairo and Silicon Valley.
Session Title: WHY YOU SHOULD BREAK THE RULES: What I learned from launching 18 Days in Egypt
18 Days in Egypt | Call to Action – Subtitled from 18DaysInEgypt Team on Vimeo.