Mstyslav Chernov

In the summer of 2013, while photographing in Istanbul, Turkey, Chernov found himself in the middle of Gezi Park protests. The night violence triggered a shift from fine-art photography and documentary photography to conflict and war reporting.

In late 2013 in Ukraine's capital Kyiv, Chernov photographed the mass protests of Euromaidan as a MediaPort and Unframe correspondent. He was attacked and wounded several times. In December 2013, pro-Yanukovych police injured Chernov's hand with a baton, tore up his press credentials, and destroyed his photography equipment. In January 2014, ignoring Chernov's insignia that identified him as a member of the press, a pro-Yanukovych policeman threw a stun grenade into Chernov, injuring his legs and eye with shrapnel. Many international reporters flocked to cover the Ukrainian Revolution which later transitioned into the annexation of Crimea and War in Donbas. Chernov provided the international reporters with local assistance, also starting as a translator and a stringer for Associated Press. Chernov's background in photography and his partnership with other reporters allowed him to polish his video filming skills and become a regular freelancer for Associated Press in May 2014.

By July 2014, Chernov already worked as an independent multi-format (text, photo, and video) journalist for Associated Press. Russian military intervention to Donbas had created another conflict zone in Ukraine, and Chernov covered War in Donbas in 2014, becoming one of very few journalists who reported the conflict from both sides. He was the first journalist to publish video footage from the scene after the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. On his third day working as an independent AP journalist, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down in the area, and Chernov provided the first images of the incident. His reporting played an essential role in the AP's coverage of the event. For his coverage of the event, Chernov was awarded the "Young Talent of the Year" Award by Royal Television Society. In subsequent years as an AP journalist and war correspondent, Chernov covered the war in Syria and the Battle of Mosul in Iraq as well as the 2015 European migrant crisis in Greece, Macedonia, Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Austria, and Germany. In 2017, in Mosul, a sniper bullet pierced Chernov's camera and stuck in his ballistic vest. Chernov's Iraqi videos were finalist entries for the Rory Peck Award in 2017 and for Royal Television Society awards in 2017 and 2018. Chernov's reports were published worldwide, including being picked up by The Independent, The Seattle Times, Military Times, Navy Times, and Washington Examiner. Chernov's photographs were also published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Le Monde, Deutsche Welle, Die Zeit, and his videos were aired on BBC, Euronews, CNN, Fox News, Sky News, Al Jazeera. In 2016, a Royal Television Society judge commented that "given the range, volume, and global distribution of [Chernov's] footage, there may have been days last year when we watched [Chernov's reporting] all day." In the spring of 2020, Chernov worked in Libya, Syria, covering the migration crisis in Turkey. From May to July and from September to October, he filmed the course of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ukraine. In August 2020, Chernov worked in Belarus, covering the presidential elections. After the announcement that Lukashenko was the winner of the elections, large-scale protests began. In Minsk, Chernov was captured and beaten by Belarusian law enforcement officers. He lost consciousness after being beaten in a police van and regained consciousness in an ambulance. During protests Chernov recorded the moment when a man in a bloody shirt fell to the ground. Later it was established that this protester was Oleksandr Taraikovsky. Chernov's photo and video became incontrovertible evidence that Taraikovsky was shot at point-blank range by members of the special forces on August 10, 2020 in Minsk, while government media tried to portray the incident as something that happened due to the carelessness of a protester. After that, Chernov was deported from the country, and his accreditation was not extended. During 2020 and 2021, he also worked in Nagorno-Karabakh, Afghanistan, Lithuania, and Armenia. In February and March 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Chernov and the freelancer Evgeniy Maloletka, working for AP, stayed in Mariupol, which was encircled by Russian troops, under siege, and extensively bombed, whereas the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Defense Ministry claimed that Russia only targets military installations. Chernov and Maloletka were among the few journalists, and, according to the AP, the only international journalists in Mariupol during that period, and their photographs were used by Western media to cover the situation. According to Chernov, on 11 March they were in a hospital taking photos when they were taken of the city with the assistance of Ukrainian soldiers. They managed to escape from Mariupol unharmed. On 23 May 2022 Chernov, together with Maloletka and Vasilisa Stepanenko, received the Knight International Journalism Award for their work in Mariupol. At the end of 2022 he was included in the nationwide Ukrainian ratings "People of the HB 2022 in the year of war" and "14 songs, photos and art objects that became symbols of Ukrainian resistance" by Forbes Ukraine. Chernov became an individual laureate of the 2026 Open Society Prize.

In 2024, Chernov became a member of the jury for the ImpACT Award at the 81st Venice International Film Festival. Chernov chaired the jury for the Golden Eye (L'Œil d'or) Award for Best Documentary at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.

In Mariupol Chernov collected footage with field producer Vasilisa Stepanenko and cameraman Evgeniy Maloletka. After escaping the siege together with the team of Frontline (PBS channel) he made the documentary 20 Days in Mariupol. The film was included in the competition of Sundance Film Festival in the World Cinema Documentary Competition category. The film's world premiere took place at the festival in January 2023. The film won the Audience Award in World Cinema Documentary category. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 100%. In 2023, 20 Days in Mariupol received the Cinema for Peace award as the best documentary of the year, and the Standing Up award at Cleveland International Film Festival. The Ukrainian premiere took place at the Docudays UA festival and the film took the main award. At the New Zealand documentary film festival Doc Edge, 20 Days in Mariupol was awarded in two nominations: Best Director (Mstyslav Chernov) and Best Editing (Michelle Mizner). Later, the film received The Tim Hetherington Award at Sheffield DocFest. The film was released in selected theaters in the US on July 14, 2023 and is scheduled for a Ukraine public release from August 31. Pre-premiere screenings took place in Kyiv (Bouquet Kyiv Stage 2023 festival) and Lviv (NGO "Lviv Media Forum"). On the first weekend of September 2023, the film collected more than 530 thousand hryvnias at the Ukrainian box office, becoming the highest-grossing Ukrainian documentary in history. The Ukrainian Oscar Committee nominated "20 Days in Mariupol" from Ukraine for the 96th Academy Awards in the category "Best International Feature Film". Film won BAFTA Film Awards in "Best Documentary' category and was nominated in "Film not in the English language" category Film was included in long-lists of Academy Awards and later won the Best Documentary Feature Film category. The film won two nominations for the Kinokolo National Film Award (Best Documentary and Discovery of the Year). The film was ranked as one of the top three documentaries of 2023 by IndieWire. Film received Directors Guild of America Awards for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary. Later film won as Best Film and Best Documentary at Ukrainian National Film Academy Award Golden Dzyga. In October 2023, the film was to be shown at the Serbian Beldocs festival at the Lazarevac Cultural Center in the suburbs of Belgrade. On October 10, the Serbian Radical Party called for the cancellation of the screening of the "anti-Russian propaganda film of the Kyiv regime" which is "an attempt by the West to change the attitude of the Serbian people towards brotherly Russia". On October 12, the festival administration canceled the screening, stressing that "Beldocs is not behind this decision and did not participate in it".

Chernov re-teamed with Associated Press and Frontline for 2000 Meters to Andriivka focusing on a Ukrainian counteroffensive as they recapture Russian-occupied Andriivka. Filming began in September 2023 and focused on soldiers of the 3rd Assault Brigade fighting near Bakhmut. The project reunited Chernov with photographer Oleksandr Babenko, editor Michelle Mizner, and producer Rainey Aronson-Rath. The film's score was composed by Grammy Award winner Sam Slater, known for his work on "Chernobyl" and "Joker". It had its world premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival on 23 January 2025. Film won Directing Award: World Cinema Documentary. The film was also selected to the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. "2000 Meters to Andriivka" was shown at the IDFA (Netherlands), won the audience award at Millennium Docs Against Gravity in Poland, was presented at the Sheffield DocFest and the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. At the gala closing of the 10th Ukraina! Festiwal Filmowy in Warsaw, the film received the Audience Choice Award in the documentary category. The Ukrainian Film Week in Prague opened with the screening of the documentary 2000 Meters to Andriyivka. It was included in the "Horizons" program of the 59th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. It won at the DocAviv International Documentary Film Festival. It also won the audience award at Millennium Docs Against Gravity, at the Transilvania International Film Festival (TIFF.24), at the Mykolaychuk OPEN. It also had a special screening at the 20th Rome Film Festival in October 2025. The film will represent Ukraine in the category "Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature" at the 98th Academy Awards. and was longlisted for the award in Academy Award for Best International Feature Film nomination and shortlisted in Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature nomination. The film was nominated in the category of "Best Documentary Feature" at the Gotham Awards 2025. At the National Film Critics' Award "Kinokolo" the film won in the category "Best Feature Documentary", and Chernov himself won in the nomination "Best Director". The film won the News & Documentary Emmy Awards for Outstanding Direction: Documentary and was nominated in five other categories. Film was nominated for the BAFTA in Best Documentary category. Chernov himself also won the Writers Guild of America Award in the Documentary Screenplay category and duPont–Columbia Award. Together with cinematographer Alex Babenko, Chernov received the George Polk Award in the Foreign Television Reporting category and the ASC Award in the Documentary category. The film was nominated for 4 national film awards «Golden Dzyga», winning two of them: Best Documentary and Best Cinematography.

Outside observers note Chernov's deep compassion to humanity that makes his imagery influential. They also note the vast spectrum of his creative work and his "exceptional eye for detail." A Ukrainian photographer and a photography exhibition curator in Kharkiv, Volodymyr Ohloblin, commented on Chernov's work: "Mstyslav has exceptionally deep vision [sic] it's obvious that he feels for the people on his photographs. Mstyslav has a good intuition, a rare gift, how to convey in photographs what he sees." The Director of the European news section of Associated Press, Caro Kriel, said: "Through his involvement in some critical stories, Chernov has quickly proved himself to be a rare, multiformat journalist with an uncanny ability to develop a story in the most difficult conditions. He is a natural visual storyteller and his signature trait – compassion for humanity that suffuses almost every image – has ensured that his work has had an immediate impact." A judge of Royal Television Society Awards commented that "[Chernov] has an exceptional eye for detail and a full range of shots across his portfolio, capturing emotion and conveying the fear and sometimes panic that was at the heart of so many news events last year." Chernov prefers to work "light," carrying simpler, smaller equipment, that could always be on him and ready to shoot at all times. He works with small cameras and usually doesn't use a tripod.

In January 2020, Chernov presented his psychological novel Dreamtime (Ukrainian: Часи сновидінь), a 500-page fiction conceived and written over an 8-year period. Alluding to aboriginal Dreamtime, the novel examines societies' collective experiences ("dreams") with war and conflict and is loosely based on real events that Chernov witnessed during the war in Donbas, the Migration crisis in Europe and others. It features four intertwined plot lines that span across vast geography from Eastern Ukraine to Southern Europe, then to Southeast Asia, yet united by a common theme of internal conflict resolution. The novel was launched in Kyiv as a focal point of a video art exhibition devoted to the role of media in creating public collective experiences. The novel was credited for its creative literary application of dreams to showcase protagonists' psyches and for its "serious" and "masterly prose". The novel was included in the TOP books of 2020 by volunteers, writers and military journalists about the Russian-Ukrainian war according to "Army FM". Literary expert and critic Tetyana Trofymenko believes that The Dreamtime is unexpectedly strong and stylistically formed prose for a debutant. Journalist and critic Yuryi Volodarsky called the novel the first large-scale literary text in Ukrainian literature in which the war in Donbas is shown from the other side of the front. "A novel for a debut is surprisingly bright, but in so many moments it is uncomfortable that it is better to ignore it. "The Dreamtime" is devoid of both the author's evaluative judgments and the transmission of "correct" views from the mouths of the characters. Chernov is first and foremost a humanist, this is evident in his prose no less than in photos from hot spots". On September 26, 2023, Mstislav Chernov stated that the publishing house "Samit-knyga" had not paid him a fee two years after the publication of the novel and refused to report on the sale of the book. The publishing house apologized and sent reports. Chernov forbade the publishing house to further use his name and book for advertising.

Часи сновидінь = Dreamtime (2020) The Dreamtime. Cherry Orchard, 2022. ISBN 978-1644699881. In English.

20 Days in Mariupol (2023) 2000 Meters to Andriivka (2025)