I am an independent journalist, researcher and photographer who writes investigative and exploratory stories that place ordinary people at the center of the narrative. For the past decade I have reported throughout Africa, focusing on Liberia’s post-war construction and its struggles to reconcile with its brutal past that is deeply connected to the history of slavery in the United States. I am now based in the Sahel region exploring the ongoing security and humanitarian crisis and the legacy of revolution in Burkina Faso.
I reported on the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak and its aftermath, for which I contributed to The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage and was awarded the Kurt Schork Memorial Award. I have written about the Liberian Civil War, political violence and authoritarianism in Uganda, coffee cuppers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, handicapped rappers, mystical puppeteers, mixed-faith families and former child soldiers.
I believe that stories about creativity, resistance and the human spirit should sit alongside investigations and hard news. I often live in the countries that I cover and am committed to forming connections with the people and places about which I write. Drinking mint tea brewed over charcoal, eating in cook shops, hustling for space in the thick of the traffic on a fixed-gear bicycle and taking pauses with strangers on wooden benches on the side of the road are all part of life as a writer in West Africa, where the French phrase “on est ensemble” or “we are together” is a lived philosophy.
My writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Vogue, Columbia Journalism Review, Newsweek, Businessweek, Time, Smithsonian Magazine, Wired, Foreign Policy, Stern, World Politics Review and PassBlue and has been translated into French, Spanish, German and Japanese. I have worked on award-winning investigative documentaries for Frontline and a comedy docu-series for Netflix and my photography has been published in the Economist, BBC, Quartz, the Guardian, CJR and others.
I have been a fellow at the Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Human Rights at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and my work has been supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the International Women’s Media Foundation and the Forum for African Investigative Reporters. I have been a Logan Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good and an Art of Journalism Fellow at MacDowell where I worked on my ongoing non-fiction project on Liberia that focuses on the seaside community of West Point.
Photo by Michaël Zumstein.
clair.macdougall@gmail.com ckmac@protonmail.com