Filmmaker and Professor Janice Engel returns to AVFS to explore the world of documentary filmmaking. Using curiosity as the base, Janice will dive into how to move ideas into action.
BIO: Janice Engel’s feature documentary RAISE HELL: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins, premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, won the Audience Award at SXSW and numerous other festival awards. Released by Magnolia Pictures in August 2019, Raise Hell stayed in theaters for a spectacular 18 week run from Alabama to Alaska! Raise Hell reflects themes Janice holds dear: speaking truth to power, igniting activism, advocacy and finding our shared humanity.
An award-winning filmmaker and showrunner who has made numerous documentaries, non-fiction television specials and series including: Jackson Browne: Going Home, (Cable Ace-Award), Ted Hawkins Amazing Grace, (Rose D’Or Special Jury Prize) and the provocative docu-series, Addicted, (Prism Award).
Under her own banner, she created What We Carry, an ongoing multi-media documentary series dedicated to preserving Holocaust survivors’ stories. Premiered at The Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, What We Carry is housed in the permanent collection at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and has been viewed by over 50,000 people. It has been used extensively throughout the Norfolk, Virginia school system and beyond. The intention is to expand this into a platform that can be used as an educational tool throughout the US and eventually for all survivors of genocide globally.
Janice is a professor at Academy of Art University, San Francisco, where she loves teaching documentary film and other aspects of filmmaking to students from all over the world. She is a member of the International Documentary Association and the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. A longtime resident of Los Angeles, California, she enjoys her tenure as Vice-President of the Barnsdall Art Park Foundation and lives in Los Angeles with her wife and two dogs.