Debra Zimmerman

Last updated
Debra Zimmerman
Born
New York City, New York, U.S.

Debra Zimmerman is an American film distributor and lecturer. She has been the Executive Director non-profit media arts organization Women Make Movies since 1983. [1] [2]

Contents

Life and career

Zimmerman was born in New York City. In the late 1970s she worked as an intern at Women Make Movies and was then hired by the organization as the Associate Producer and Editor of Why Women Stay, which was directed by Jacqueline Shortell-McSweeney. [3] After working freelance in production, she went to work at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation as an Assistant to Patricia Carry Stewart.[ citation needed ]

In 1983 she became the Executive Director of Women Make Movies. She has moderated panels and given master classes at the Sundance Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, and Reel Screen. [4] She lectures regularly on women filmmakers and independent film at various universities, including the New School for Social Research, the University of Texas at Austin, UCLA, Harvard University and Smith College. [5] [6] She has keynoted conferences on women’s cinema at SUNY Stony Brook and the University of Sunderland, England. [7] [8]

Zimmerman served on the juries of various film festivals, including the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, the Cartagena Film Festival and the One World Film Festival. she held the Laurie Chair in Women's Studies at Douglass College and Rutgers University in 2014-15. [9] She was the author of a Chapter, Film as Activism and transformative praxis: Women Make Movies in the book, The Routledge Companion to Cinema & Gender. [10] She is also a member of the Board of Directors of Cinema Tropical. [11]

Awards and honors

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kim Longinotto</span> British documentary film maker (born 1948)

Kim Longinotto is a British documentary film maker, well known for making films that highlight the plight of female victims of oppression or discrimination. Longinotto has made more than 20 films, usually featuring inspiring women and girls at their core. Her subjects have included female genital mutilation in Kenya, women standing up to rapists in India, and the story of Salma, an Indian Muslim woman who smuggled poetry out to the world while locked up by her family for decades.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gwendolyn Audrey Foster</span> American scholar and filmmaker

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is an experimental filmmaker, artist and author. She is Willa Cather Professor Emerita in Film Studies. Her work has focused on gender, race, ecofeminism, queer sexuality, eco-theory, and class studies. From 1999 through the end of 2014, she was co-editor along with Wheeler Winston Dixon of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. In 2016, she was named Willa Cather Endowed Professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and took early retirement in 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Molly Haskell</span> American film and theatre critic

Molly Clark Haskell is an American film critic and author. She contributed to The Village Voice—first as a theatre critic, then as a movie reviewer—and from there moved on to New York magazine and Vogue. Her most influential book is From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. She co-hosted Turner Classic Movies' The Essentials with Robert Osborne in 2006 for one season.

The Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival is the largest documentary festival in North America. The event takes place annually in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The 27th edition of the festival took place online throughout May and June 2020. In addition to the annual festival, Hot Docs owns and operates the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, administers multiple production funds, and runs year-round screening programs including Doc Soup and Hot Docs Showcase.

Celine Parreñas Shimizu is a filmmaker and film scholar. She is well known for her work on race, sexuality and representations. She is currently Dean of the Arts Division at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michal Aviad</span> Israeli film director

Michal Aviad is an Israeli director, script writer, producer and senior lecturer at the Department of Cinema and Television, Tel Aviv University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Women Make Movies</span>

Women Make Movies is a non-profit feminist media arts organization based in New York City. Founded by Ariel Dougherty and Sheila Paige with Dolores Bargowski, WMM was first a feminist production collective that emerged from city-wide Women's Liberation meetings in September 1969. They produced four films by 1973. Dougherty and Paige incorporated the organization in March 1972 as a community based workshop to teach film to everyday women. A distribution service was also begun as an earned income program. In the mid-1970s a membership was created that screened and distributed members' work. In the early 1980s focus shifted to concentrate on distribution of independent films by and about women. WMM also provides production assistance to women filmmakers.

American Film Festival is a film festival held annually in October in Wrocław, Poland. The first festival was held from 20 to 24 October 2010. The festival is organized by Stowarzyszenie Nowe Horyzonty and co-funded by the Wroclaw Municipality and Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.

<i>Miss Representation</i> 2011 American film

Miss Representation is a 2011 American documentary film written, directed, and produced by Jennifer Siebel Newsom. The film explores how mainstream media contributes to the under-representation of women in influential positions by circulating limited and often disparaging portrayals of women. The film premiered in the documentary category at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexis Krasilovsky</span> American filmmaker and educator

Alexis Krasilovsky is an American filmmaker, writer and professor. Krasilovsky's first film, End of the Art World documented artists including Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. Krasilovsky moved from New York to Los Angeles in the 1970s to pursue her passion for filmmaking, writing and directing films through her company, Rafael Film. She is the writer and director of the global documentary features, Women Behind the Camera and Let Them Eat Cake.

Ariel Maria Dougherty is an American independent film maker, feminist media advocate and activist. She is best known as the co-founder of non-profit media arts organization Women Make Movies. In recent years she has written extensively about the intersections of women's rights and media justice and the need for increased support for both.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Athena Film Festival</span>

The Athena Film Festival is an annual film festival held at Barnard College of Columbia University in New York City. The festival takes place in February and focuses on films celebrating women and leadership. In addition to showing films, the festival hosts filmmaker workshops, master classes and panels on a variety of topics relevant to women in the film industry. The Athena Film Festival was co-founded by Kathryn Kolbert, Founding Director of the Athena Center for Leadership Studies at Barnard College and Melissa Silverstein, founder of the Women and Hollywood initiative and the festival's Artistic Director.

Maya Gallus is a Canadian documentary filmmaker, and co-founder of Red Queen Productions with Justine Pimlott. Her films have been screened at international film festivals, including Toronto International Film Festival, Montreal World Film Festival, Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest, SEOUL International Women’s Film Festival, Singapore International Film Festival, This Human World Film Festival (Vienna) and Women Make Waves (Taiwan), among others. Her work has also screened at the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Donostia Kultura, San Sebastián and Canada House UK, as well as theatrically in Tokyo, San Francisco, Key West and Toronto, and been broadcast around the world. She has won numerous awards, including a Gemini Award for Best Direction for Girl Inside, and has been featured in The Guardian, UK; Ms. (Magazine), Curve (Magazine), Bust (Magazine), Salon (Magazine), POV and The Walrus, among others. She is a Director/Writer alumna of the Canadian Film Centre and a participant in Women in the Director’s Chair. She will be honoured with a "Focus On" retrospective at the 2017 Hot Docs festival.

Pearl Bowser was an American author, collector, television director, film scholar, film director, producer, filmmaker, independent distributor and film archivist. Along with her peers Mel Roman and Charles Hobson, Bowser researched and curated "The Black Film" retrospective at the Jewish Museum in 1970. This prompted a new wave of public interest into "exhibiting, producing, and engaging with African American cinema beyond borders". Most of her exalted career was spent traveling the globe in order to cultivate audiences for marginalized filmmakers. An example of her efforts, and also her most groundbreaking work, manifested in her research on "early-1900s Black film pioneer Oscar Micheaux". This research can be seen in her book on the first ten years of the career of Oscar Micheaux, an African-American who directed 40 "race pictures" between 1918 and 1940. She is thus credited for having helped rediscover some of Oscar Micheaux's rare surviving films. She is the founder of African Diaspora Images, a collection of visual and oral histories that documents the history of African-American filmmaking. Part of her journey included teaching young people film in the 1960s and 1970s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Penny Lane (filmmaker)</span> American independent filmmaker (born 1978)

Penny Lane is an American independent filmmaker, known for her documentary films. Her humor and unconventional approach to the documentary form, including the use of archival Super 8 footage and YouTube videos, have earned her critical acclaim.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami</span>

Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami is a Sundance Award-winning Iranian documentary filmmaker who was born in Tehran. She has directed one full-length documentary, four short documentaries and one animated documentary.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ja'Tovia Gary</span> American artist and filmmaker

Ja'Tovia Gary is an American artist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is held in the permanent collections at the Whitney Museum, Studio Museum of Harlem, and others. She is best known for her documentary film The Giverny Document (2019), which received awards including the Moving Ahead Award at the Locarno Film Festival, the Juror Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Best Experimental Film at the Blackstar Film Festival, and the Douglas Edwards Experimental Film Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

Kimi Takesue is an experimental filmmaker. Her films have screened widely, including at Sundance Film Festival, Locarno Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Los Angeles Film Festival, South by Southwest, ICA London, Cinéma du Réel, DMZ International Documentary Film Festival, Krakow Film Festival, Slamdance Film Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai, and the Walker Art Center. Her films have been broadcast on PBS, IFC, and the Sundance Channel. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship, and two NYFA fellowships. She is associate professor at Rutgers University–Newark. 

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amy Geller</span> American documentary director and producer

Amy Geller is an American documentary film director and producer. She is best known for her work on the documentaries The Rabbi Goes West and The Guys Next Door.

Tracy Droz Tragos is an American documentary filmmaker. She is known for her documentary films Rich Hill, Abortion: Stories Women Tell, and Plan C.

References

  1. ↑ "Feminism Motivates the Doc Mogul: Debra Zimmerman". povmagazine.com. 9 May 2013. Retrieved 2020-03-01.
  2. ↑ "Austin Translation: Debra Zimmerman, Women Make Movies". realscreen.com. Retrieved 2020-03-01.
  3. ↑ "Why women stay produced and directed by Jacqueline Shortell-McSweeney, associate producer, Debra Zimmerman". nlb.gov.sg. Retrieved 2020-03-01.
  4. ↑ "DOC TALK: Promoting Your Documentary Film with Debra Zimmerman". events.newschool.edu. Retrieved 2020-03-01.
  5. ↑ "An Evening with Debra Zimmerman". sites.rutgers.edu. Retrieved 2020-03-01.
  6. ↑ ""40 Years and Counting: Women Make Movies and the Landscape of Women's Media" a talk by Debra Zimmerman". liberalarts.utexas.edu. Retrieved 2020-03-01.
  7. ↑ "Global Women's Cinema Conference September 18 to 20". news.stonybrook.edu. 18 August 2014. Retrieved 2020-03-01.
  8. ↑ "Past events". sunderland.ac.uk. Retrieved 2020-03-01.
  9. ↑ "Undergraduate Spring 2015 Course Descriptions". womens-studies.rutgers.edu. Retrieved 2020-03-01.
  10. ↑ "The Routledge Companion to Cinema & Gender". routledge.com. Retrieved 2020-03-01.
  11. ↑ "STAFF". cinematropical.com. Retrieved 2020-01-15.
  12. ↑ "NOMINEES AND AWARD RECIPIENTS 2018". femaleeyefilmfestival.com. Retrieved 2020-03-01.
  13. ↑ "Hot Docs to Honor Debra Zimmerman of Women Make Movies". hollywoodreporter.com. 16 January 2013. Retrieved 2020-03-01.
  14. ↑ "Past Honorees". nywift.org. Retrieved 2020-03-01.
  15. ↑ "2011 Athena Award Winners". athenafilmfestival.com. Retrieved 2020-03-01.
  16. ↑ "Festival Awards". highfallsfilmfestival.com. Retrieved 2020-03-01.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.