Manda K Photo

RESUME (last updated March 2023)

Amanda Kari McHugh received her BFA in Acting from The University of the Arts in 2009. During this time she started and ran a club on campus, which hosted a webradio show and hosted a concert series. It was here that she learned the power of social media and crowd-sourcing, and found her knack for producing.

For her last semester, she attended the esteemed National Theater Institute to study directing, scene design, and playwriting. After a short and successful stint as a film actor and becoming SAG-AFTRA, she switched sides of the camera to pursue a career in documentary film, with the intention of marrying docs with events to increase engagement and encourage social change.

Throughout her freelance career she’s worked in the production and the art departments on History Channel, Discovery channel and Bravo shows, helped raise nearly 300k for a feature documentary about the Twin Peaks star, Catherine Coulson, co-founded two non-profits, shot photos and video for events all over the country and Costa Rica, wrote for several culture-focused publications and directed and shot several documentary and short film projects.

While most of the world was retreating in 2020, McHugh leaned in. She created a 50s-style PSA on COVID-19 Etiquette which has played in the pre-show of drive-ins all over the country and been featured on LA Cityview’s News Channel 35, and ABC’s News Channel 9 in Syracuse. Her feature-length documentary “The Family Tree,” is now in post-production, and has been featured at Canon Burbank with Female Filmmakers and workshopped with Sundance Collab.

McHugh’s passion for creating social change through the content she creates is what led her to apply for the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, to earn her MA in Engagement Journalism, which she graduated from in December 2022. During this time, she honed her skills in community engagement, qualitative research, data analysis, metrics and outcomes, advanced reporting skills, social media tools, SEO, Google analytics, advanced interview skills, and multimedia journalism. The community she worked with is those impacted by adoption whom the media doesn't cover enough: namely birth mothers and adoptees. Utilizing these tactics, she created a multi-platform project called Voices of Adoption. This project spanned TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Substack. The first post on TikTok, which responded to the Dobbs opinion leak, went viral at over 142k views and nearly 2k comments.

In fall 2022, she co-created the first season of a Newmark’s Narrative Podcast class called What’s It Like…? Last summer, she was fortunate to work as a production intern for StoryCorps, where she cut tape for several pieces for the NPR segment and one story she pitched and co-produced is now archived with the Library of Congress.

Currently, McHugh is pursuing her second masters at the Newmark J-School in the M.A. Journalism program, where her concentration is in arts and culture and her specialization is in multimedia. She’s producing monthly episodes for the television news magazine show 219West on CUNY TV and is working on a place-based audio documentary in collaboration with the Queens Memory Project. Her writing beat is currently on independent film, where she is working on a piece on how the lives of Rebecca and Pete Davis are unintentionally reflected in their upcoming documentary feature, “Join or Die.” She is also working on a 12-week photo essay, capturing the different ways in which adults incorporate play into their lives.