Yasmin Vossoughian does not consider herself a writer. “I like to interact with people—that’s how I learn,” she explains. For an economics class at Oxy, the assignment was to do a report on the differences between what people do in society. With video camera in hand, she chronicled a day in the life of a sewage worker and a CEO, shooting in manholes and high-rises and talking with both about their work—one for minimum wage, the other for millions a year.

“My parents are from Iran. I was born and raised in the United States,” she says. “I grew up in a smaller town about an hour north of New York City that was not diverse. My family is Muslim. There were maybe three Jewish kids and three black kids in my hometown. And so I really crave diversity in my life—it’s something I’ve always been drawn to.”

In 2004, using the Handycam that her parents gave her for graduation, she spent eight weeks traveling around Iran, conducting interviews for a piece on what it was like to be a young person there.

“I would shoot things by candlelight, and I would be at these parties with these young people, which were illegal,” Vossoughian says. “It would be as if I shot it all on my iPhone now.” She returned to New York, edited the material together, and submitted it to Current TV “because they were looking for video journalists. It became my first piece to be played on Current, and from there I started doing a bunch of pieces for them out of Iran.”