Career
Early in her career, Humes had determined to make a film biography of her father, Harold L. Humes. Beginning in 1992, Humes began to shoot and collect footage of her sisters, Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, George Plimpton and others who had known her father well. In 2008, Humes released Doc , which chronicled the life and impact of the influential activist, novelist, and editor. [1] A one-hour version of the 90-minute film ran as an episode of Independent Lens on PBS.
She is currently making a film portrait of the American radical filmmaker Shirley Clarke, in association with Milestone Films and with a grant from the NEA. [2]
After working in television for several years, Humes directed A Little Vicious , a short documentary film about Bandit, a dog who had been sentenced to death for biting. Narrated by actor Kevin Bacon, and featuring dog trainer/philosopher Vicki Hearne, this "offbeat documentary" was lauded by the New York Times reviewer as paying "rewarding attention to the little peculiarities of all involved." [3] The film was nominated for the 1991 Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject).
Humes returned to television as a segment producer for Michael Moore's short-lived TV Nation series. In 1995 Humes released Lizzie Borden Hash & Rehash , a documentary short exploring the strange fascination held by some people for Lizzie Borden, the Massachusetts woman accused but not convicted of killing her parents in 1892. [4]
After working as an associate producer for A Life Apart: Hasidism in America , a film by Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky, in 2001 Humes made a documentary on Canadian anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis for the National Geographic Channel. [4] She made a six-part series on chronic unemployment that ran on Salon in 2012. [5]
Clea Helen D'Etienne DuVall is an American actress and filmmaker. Her film appearances include The Faculty (1998); But I'm a Cheerleader; Girl, Interrupted ; Ghosts of Mars (2001); Identity;21 Grams ; The Grudge (2004); Zodiac (2007); and Argo (2012). On television, DuVall starred as Emma Borden in Lizzie Borden Took an Ax (2014) and its miniseries spinoff, The Lizzie Borden Chronicles (2015). Her other credits include Carnivàle (2003–2005), Heroes (2006–2007), American Horror Story (2012–2013), Better Call Saul (2015–2017), Veep (2016–2019), and The Handmaid's Tale (2018–2022). She also voiced Elsa on Fox's HouseBroken, which she co-created, from 2021 to 2023.
Lizzie Borden is an American filmmaker, best known for her early independent films Born in Flames (1983) and Working Girls (1986).
No wave cinema was an underground filmmaking movement that flourished on the Lower East Side of New York City from about 1976 to 1985. Associated with the artists’ group Collaborative Projects, no wave cinema was a stripped-down style of guerrilla filmmaking that emphasized dark edgy mood and unrehearsed immediacy above many other artistic concerns – similar to the parallel no wave music movement in its raw and rapid style.
Independent Lens is a weekly television series airing on PBS featuring documentary films made by independent filmmakers. Past seasons of Independent Lens were hosted by Angela Bassett, Don Cheadle, Susan Sarandon, Edie Falco, Terrence Howard, Maggie Gyllenhaal, America Ferrera, Mary-Louise Parker, and Stanley Tucci, who served two stints as host from 2012-2014.
Thomas Furneaux Lennon is a documentary filmmaker. He was born in Washington, D.C., graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1968 and Yale University in 1973.
Stephen Henderson Talbot is a TV documentary producer, writer and reporter. Talbot directed and produced "The Movement and the 'Madman' " for the PBS series American Experience in 2023. He is a longtime contributor to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and worked for over 16 years for the series Frontline.
Arthur Dong is an American filmmaker and author whose work centers on Asia America and anti-gay prejudice. He was raised in San Francisco, California, graduating from Galileo High School in June 1971. He received his BA in film from San Francisco State University and also holds a Directing Fellow Certificate from the American Film Institute Center for Advanced Film Studies. In 2007, SFSU named Dong its Alumnus of the year “for his continued success in the challenging arena of independent documentary filmmaking and his longstanding commitment to social justice."
Renee Tajima-Peña is an American filmmaker whose work focuses on immigrant communities, race, gender and social justice. Her directing and producing credits include the documentaries Who Killed Vincent Chin?, No Más Bebés, My America...or Honk if You Love Buddha, Calavera Highway, Skate Manzanar, Labor Women and the 5-part docuseries Asian Americans.
A Little Vicious is a 1991 American short documentary film directed by Immy Humes about a dog in Connecticut about to be killed for biting people, until animal trainer Vicki Hearne steps in to help. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short. It later aired on the PBS series POV.
Melody Gilbert is an independent documentary filmmaker, and educator from Washington, D.C. now living in Natchitoches, Louisiana. She has directed, filmed, produced, and sometimes edited, seven independent feature-length documentaries since 2002. The Documentary Channel calls her "one of the most fearless filmmakers in contemporary documentary cinema." She is currently an assistant professor of journalism at Northwestern State University.
Eddie Schmidt is an American director, showrunner, producer, writer, commentator and satirist. He is perhaps best known for producing several feature documentaries that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, including Valentine Road (2013), This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006), and Twist of Faith (2005), and for directing and showrunning television projects including Ugly Delicious (2018), Chelsea Does (2016), The Case of: JonBenét Ramsey (2016), and Good One: A Show About Jokes (2024).
Margaret Brown is an American film director who has directed four feature length documentaries. Her film Descendant, about the descendants of survivors of the last ship to carry enslaved Africans into the United States, was shortlisted for the 2023 Academy Awards.
Lindsey Dryden is a British film director, producer and writer.
Matt Wolf is an American filmmaker, documentarian, and producer. His notable films include Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, Teenage, Bayard & Me,Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, and Spaceship Earth. In 2010, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. His subjects include youth culture, artists, archives, music, and queer history.
Connie Field is an American film director known for her work in documentaries.
Julia Bell Reichert was an American Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, activist, and feminist. She was a co-founder of New Day Films. Reichert's filmmaking career spanned over 50 years as a director and producer of documentaries.
Kimberlee Bassford is an independent documentary filmmaker from Honolulu, Hawai‘i. In 2005, she founded Making Waves Films LLC, which is a documentary production company. She advocates for gender equity and diversity in films and television. Most of her work focuses on Asian American women and young girls, and her films actively seek to correct underrepresentation of those groups in the media.
Melissa Haizlip is an American film producer, director and writer most notable for her 2018 award winning film, Mr. SOUL!. Haizlip won an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Writing in a Documentary for Mr. SOUL!.
Beth Levison is an Academy Award-nominated American independent documentary film producer and director based in New York City. Following a career in unscripted television, she has been in the independent documentary filmmaking trenches for the last 15 years.
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