Ninka Mbaye

Ninka Mbaye is an journalist, presenter, and producer. A third culture child, born to a French mother, and a Senegalese father and brought up in the UK. Her bilingualism in French and English has allowed her to work across much of Europe as well as Francophone and Anglophone Africa.

Over the past five years, Ninka has been working for CNN producing stories in the UK, France, and West Africa for shows such as African Voices, Africa Avant-Garde, Inside Africa, and Marketplace Africa covering exciting stories and portraits of people in business, the arts, and culture. She has worked at the French music TV channel TRACE where she wrote, presented and produced a music and culture show called CODE, a 10-part series on Afro-urban culture around the world, consisting of regional storytelling and interviews with the likes of Ckay, Fireboy, Shaggy, Liam Payne and Sean Paul. The show was broadcasted across 28 countries in 12 languages to an audience of 326M., filmed in French and English.

Her latest project saw her appear as a guest presenter, specialised in music for CNN’s Inside Africa. The episode, filmed in the UK and South Africa, showcased the worldwide success of the music genre Amapiano.

She has recently sold her first documentary As They See Me to DW where it is being translated into Spanish, Arabic, Hindu, and Bahasa. The episode is set to appear on their linear TV channels and documentary YouTube channel, boasting over 6M subscribers.

She is interested in exploring more investigative journalism, exploring social issues, tackling difficult conversations and making them relatable and engaging to her audience. She finds vulnerability very powerful. Her mission is to understand what makes people who they are: the good, the bad, and the ugly, to lift the lid on taboos and unspoken truths while seeking to understand how events and experiences in a person's life have shaped their story.