Manisha is a multi-award-winning investigative journalist & documentary filmmaker, specialising in combining open-source intelligence (OSINT) techniques with fieldwork to expose human rights abuses in conflict and war. She is a Forbes Under 30 media honouree and has been nominated for/won 17 international awards, including an Amnesty Award, with her investigations broadcast to over 300 million worldwide. Manisha serves as a judge for the International Emmy Awards.
Manisha's debut documentary, “War Crimes for Likes”, exposed how war crimes committed in the Libyan civil war were being shared on social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to incite violence. It directly identified the members of the Libyan National Army’s special forces committing these crimes and tracked down its survivors in exile. The film prompted a response from the UK Foreign Office saying they take “the allegations very seriously”. The story was nominated for Best Investigation 2019 by the Association of International Broadcasting.
Since then, she has produced investigations for the BBC that exposed war crimes by Russian planes in Syria, tracked down the foreign jet that bombed the migrant detention centre in Libya, exposed an online human trafficking network across the Gulf, investigated how an IRGC-backed airline spread coronavirus across the Middle East, and more. Evidence uncovered in these investigations has been presented at/cited/acted upon by various international bodies, notably the UK Houses of Parliament, the U.K. Foreign Office, the Norwegian government, the US government, and the United Nations Security Council.