Alison Killing
Journalist, architect
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Alison Killing uses satellite imagery and architectural techniques to investigate urgent social issues.
Why you should listen
Alison Killing is an investigative journalist and licensed architect. In 2021, together with Megha Rajagopalan and Christo Buschek, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for a series of articles using satellite imagery amd architectural analysis to expose a network of detention camps in Xinjiang, China. Her reporting continues to focus on Xinjiang, as well as on broader issues of surveillance and migration.
Killing's previous projects include "Migration Trail," a mapped data visualization that tells stories of migration to Europe in real time over ten days. She also produced and curated an exhibition on death and architecture called Death in Venice. She is a TED Fellow.
Alison Killing’s TED Talks
More news and ideas from Alison Killing
Live from TED2022
Courage: Notes from Session 1 of TED2022
April 11, 2022
It’s been three years since TED’s last flagship conference in Vancouver, BC, Canada; to say a lot has changed in the intervening years would be an understatement. We return for this year’s conference not for more of the same but to celebrate a new era — in AI, clean energy, the ways we work and […]
Continue readingFellows Friday
Design for dying: A TED Fellow thinks deeply about the architecture of death
February 6, 2015
Alison Killing thinks a lot about death … and specifically, how its ubiquitous, hidden presence shapes our cities. In Death in Venice, her June 2014 exhibition on the topic, Killing mapped London’s death-associated architectural features — hospitals, cemeteries, crematoria, and so on — making visible the invisible mechanics of death and dying. She asks us to consider: What might […]
Continue readingLive from TEDGlobal
From a floating peepshow to a jaw-dropping medical demo: A recap of Fellows Session 2 at TEDGlobal 2014
October 7, 2014
In Session 2 of today’s Fellows Talks: a waterborne peep show in San Francisco, a triage app that saves lives, the architecture of death, and more! The session starts with Bill “Blinky” Sellanga performing “Usinibore” solo on acoustic guitar. “It was a song I wrote in 2008 in response to the post-election violence,” he says, […]
Continue reading