Aletta Harrison

Aletta is a freelance video professional and educator with a background in news. She has extensive experience producing, shooting and editing short- and long-form video for online platforms, but is also an accomplished photographer, feature writer and radio journalist. During her 12 years working in various newsrooms, she covered a wide range of stories including politics, sport, conflict, entertainment and reported on a number of high-profile events such as the Oscar Pistorius Trial, the death of Nelson Mandela and the South-Sudan refugee crisis. She worked as a multimedia journalist in Cape Town, South Africa for a decade, during which time she won a number of awards for stories with a focus on the environment. Between 2017-2019 she was responsible for overseeing online short documentaries and interactive features at the largest news site in South Africa and assisted in running the video team covering daily news. During this time she won awards for stories covering topics like the Cape Town 'Day Zero' water crisis, and received recognition from WAN-IFRA (2020) for an online documentary she produced, directed, scripted and helped to film. Her work has appeared online, on television, and in print and she has interviewed notable public figures and celebrities, including Desmond Tutu, Richard Branson, Jane Goodall, John Cleese, Sixto Rodriguez and FW de Klerk to name but a few. Since 2020 she has been living in the UK where she has also been teaching video journalism as a university lecturer.