Ahmad Al Bazz

“Winning the Saïd Foundation Scholarship is the best opportunity a Levant student can ever get to pursue his/her education in the UK. It took me three years of attempts until I became well-qualified, which is proof of how high-quality and prestigious the scholarship is. Studying in the UK does not teach you content as much as it teaches you how to academically think. It has been a life changing experience that provided me with a new perspective to look at things.”

Ahmad graduated from An-Najah National University in Palestine in 2014 with a BA in Media and Mass Communication. In less than three years, he became a multi-award winning journalist and got his work published on several renowned international media outlets. In 2017, he was awarded the Saïd Foundation scholarship to study for an MA in Film and Television at the University of East Anglia in Norwich and graduated with a distinction.

For his masters dissertation, Ahmad created a short documentary film that tackled the homelessness issue in Norwich city. One month after his graduation, he was the 2nd prize winner of filmmaking category at the Nasser Bin Hamad International Youth Creativity Awards held in the Kingdom of Bahrain. Ahmad’s documentary has also been selected as a finalist by three other film festivals in the Netherlands, Morocco, and Sudan and will compete for more international awards in 2019. His most remarkable award was the Al Jazeera Documentary Channel Award for best Arab short documentary film, which he received in Qatar during his participation at the Al Jazeera Film Festival in 2015.

Ahmad hopes to effectively contribute to the Journalism sector in Palestine. His long-term ambition is to create and run the first English media outlet that commits to the universally-recognized professional journalistic standards in his country, which only has few websites that depend on translators from the Arabic version. Ahmad believes that an integral English media outlet can make a big difference in the Palestinian media reality.