Tahnee Leishman-Duncan's year working at the UN headquarters in New York

As a little kid, Tahnee Leishman-Duncan would use her parents’ video recorder to make mini-movies with her friends, these days she is more likely to be making documentaries of diplomats, royals, politicians and celebrities.

Tahnee has just returned to Port Fairy after spending a year in the US working in one the world’s most famous buildings – the UN headquarters in New York.

It was a very rare opportunity for an Australian to work in The Secretariat building – even her human rights lecturer at university would tell students that it was near impossible to be offered a position there.

So for the former Brauer College student, an internship to work at the UN turned a dream into reality.  And it wasn’t the only thing that fell into place at just the right time. Just a few months before she was offered the unpaid internship in New York, she had won a competition which included flights to the United States.

Securing a coveted role at the United Nations wasn’t a quick process. Tahnee had applied for a position when she was in her second-last year of university. Twelve months of silence followed before she heard back. “They’ve got a lot of applications to go through,” she said. “Then I started going through the interview process and that took about six months.”

Just before she graduated with a degree in journalism, film and television, Tahnee was offered a position with the Department of Public Information where she worked with a small production team alongside UN photographers and journalists.

“Each day we covered news and the work of the United Nations around the world. We reported on all UN events, meetings and conferences,” she said. “We were responsible for filming and producing promotional content, interviews with celebrity ambassadors, diplomats, world leaders and visitors.”

Some of those famous names include actors Jason Sudeikis, Maya Rudolph, Josh Gad, Gillian Anderson, Michelle Yeoh, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Princess Haya bint al Hussein of Jordan and executive director of UN Women Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka.

Just walking the hallways to her desk on the 11th floor of the UN building overlooking the Hudson River could mean running into someone famous, and it wasn’t unusual to pass the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. “I did pass Ban Ki-Moon a few times, not knowing he was going to be there,” Tahnee said. 

The first time it happened, Tahnee was running after getting through the airport-style security she had to pass every time she entered the building when she ran into a group of photographers. 

“I thought ‘what’s going on here?’ And there was Ban Ki-Moon next to me walking through the crowds. It happened quite a lot,” she said.

“A lot of the times when I was in the room with someone who’d done something amazing or something inspiring, I’d think ‘I can’t believe I’m lucky enough to be here and I’m about to interview them’.

“Just being in the presence of such an institution, and people coming from all over the world to listen to a certain conference or meeting, that’s definitely when you have to pinch yourself. It was very exciting, all the conferences, big events we had access to.”

One of those big events was a red carpet that coincided with International Day of Happiness and included the stars of The Angry Birds Movie. Tahnee was there to interview the crowd when she spotted actress Maya Rudolph, but the news crew they were working with was no where in sight.

Tahnee, and her cameraman, decided to ‘save the day’, but when she was about to ask her the first question, the publicist cut her off. Turns out that a private one-on-one interview had been arranged for later. “Safe to say I will never do that again. Red carpet lesson learnt,” she said.

Much of what Tahnee did involved working for UNTV, editing short documentaries for a global program called UN Stories which is produced in both English and French and focuses on different cultures and people’s lives across the globe. “I loved hearing people’s stories,” she said. 

While Tahnee never got to travel in her role at the UN, she had travelled in her gap year and as a journalist during her uni days to Vietnam and Cambodia where she worked on stories about human trafficking. “Seeing that really opened my eyes and made me realise just how important it was that people were on the ground,” she said.

“Even though I’ve been in UN in the headquarters, surrounded by all the conferences, excitement and the developments and taking in everything that everyone is doing at that level to help bring change for a better future, it’s really important that there are people on the ground.”

Tahnee was one of just two Australians working in the UN News Centre at the United Nations in New York. “It’s a big world out there. There’s so many opportunities now that are more accessible to us,” she said. “I feel very luckily that I got the opportunity. It was a great experience. I want to go back and relive it again.”

A year working as an intern in New York came with zero salary. That meant Tahnee had to fund her own trip.

Tahnee had seen a Facebook competition run by Australian Super offering flights to America to do a course at the Adventure Film School in the Colorado Mountains with award-winning adventure filmmaker Ben Sturgulewski. It involved trekking through snow-covered mountains for five days while filming and skiing. She sent in a video and, with the Port Fairy locals getting behind her to vote, she beat hundreds of entries to win. 

To support herself while living in New York, Tahnee had saved some money after working as a broadcast assistant at the Australian Open and Brisbane International in 2015/16. She had also worked as an assistant for Award-winning Irish film and television producer Paddy McDonald.

His film, Only the Dead, was in the running to be short-listed for the Oscars and Tahnee helped organise parties in LA and New York so voting members of the academy had a chance to see it. “It opened my eyes to what is possible and gave me an insight into film on a global level,” she said.