Executive Producer, Journalist, Full Time Faculty

Jason Samuels is a tenured journalism professor and an Emmy Award-winning television news and documentary producer. During his distinguished career, he has worked as a staff producer at ABC News, NBC News, CNN, ESPN, HBO, and Black Entertainment Television (BET).

Currently, Samuels works as a senior executive producer and consultant at Paramount Global where he has led the development and production of a slate of critically acclaimed primetime news specials, documentaries and docuseries for BET including: Black America Votes: The Biden Interview, Dream Team: Birth of the Modern Athlete, Black + Iconic: Style Gods, Stay Woke: The Black Lives Matter Movement, Smoke: Marijuana and Black America and Through the Fire: The Legacy of Barack Obama.

In 2023, Samuels co-created the groundbreaking original primetime newsmagazine series America in Black, a co-production of BET and CBS News. This award-winning series featured investigative reports, human-interest stories, and in-depth profiles reported by a notable team of correspondents, including Gayle King, Jericka Duncan, Soledad O’Brien, Ed Gordon, Wesley Lowery, Michelle Miller and Vladimir Duthiers. America in Black was renewed for a second season in 2024.

In 2019, Samuels was the producer of the feature-length independent documentary A Kid From Coney Island (Netflix) with co-producer Forest Whitaker and executive producer Kevin Durant. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Prior to producing content for Paramount Global, Samuels worked as a senior segment producer for HBO’s Emmy Award-winning newsmagazine Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.

Earlier in his career, as a long-form documentary producer at CNN, he wrote, produced, and directed several acclaimed documentaries, including Obama Revealed, Black in America Silicon Valley: The New Promise Land and Unwelcome: The Muslims Next Door.

Samuels also worked as a senior producer at ESPN (E:60) and ABC News World News Tonight, where he developed and managed the first digital network newscast.

As a long-form producer at NBC News from 1995 to 2006, Samuels wrote, produced and directed several original award-winning documentaries – most notably A Pattern of Suspicion. This groundbreaking data-driven examination of racial profiling was awarded several of the most prestigious prizes in broadcast journalism including an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, an RTNDA-Edward R. Murrow Award and an Investigative Reporter and Editor Award.

Samuels served as the Director of Graduate Studies at the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute from 2017 to 2023 and the executive director of the NYU Urban Journalism Summer Workshop from 2013 to 2023. In 2024 he founded the NYU Black Male Journalism Workshop.

Samuels earned a B.A in English from Tufts University and a Master of Journalism degree from the University of California at Berkeley. He began his career as a news writer and producer at WCVB-TV in Boston. He joined the faculty of the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute in 2009 and was awarded tenure in 2013.