Spirit of Adventure Award

Mike Shum '07 is a recipient of the 2024 Spirit of Adventure Award.

Mike Shum is an independent filmmaker who specializes in cinematography and journalism. As an Asian-American born to immigrant parents from Hong Kong, he aims to incorporate empathy and curiosity in his work and challenge normative perspectives in the media landscape today. He began his career covering stories ranging from the fall of Tripoli in Libya to the M23 rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo. His 2014 collaboration with The New York Times on an ISIS massacre in Iraq garnered him his first News and Documentary Emmy nomination for Outstanding Interview. He went on to film projects that received the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival Audience Award, the 2020 Worth-Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism, and was recently awarded the National Association of Black Journalists’ Salute to Excellence Award for his feature-length directorial debut, “Police on Trial.”

Shum credits the Block Plan for opening the door to applying his academic life to field work. At Colorado College, he studied abroad in Italy, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, and conducted independent studies in Chicago, IL and Nigeria. 

Shum eventually returned to Colorado Springs in 2023 to serve as a visiting instructor for the Sociology Department, teaching a class titled, “Sociological Thinking through Documentary Film.” 

In 2024, he was awarded the Nieman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard University.