NYWIFT | Member Profile: Lisa F. Jackson

Home Page
Calendar of Events
Member Center

IN THE NEWS

Lisa F. Jackson

Member Profile: Lisa F. Jackson

LISA F. JACKSON has been involved in documentary filmmaking for over 30 years. She most recently completed a feature length documentary that she shot in the Democratic Republic of Congo on the fate of women and girls in that country's intractable war. The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo won a Special Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.

Her work has brought her many other awards including three Emmy nominations, two Emmy awards and four CINE Golden Eagles. Tom Shales of the Washington Post has praised her documentaries as "superb" and "outstanding," John O'Connor commented in the New York Times that "producer/director Lisa Jackson is remarkably adept in getting her subjects to speak frankly and thoughtfully," and the Christian Science Monitor noted that she takes on difficult subjects "with intelligence and courage."

Jackson studied filmmaking at MIT with Ricky Leacock and has directed and/or edited dozens of films for PBS including: Voices and Visions: Emily Dickinson, Jackson Pollock: Portrait, Through Madness (1993 NYC Emmy winner), The Creative Spirit, Storytellers, The Van Cliburn Piano Competition; Bill Moyers' Journal, the prize-winning series The Mind, and segments for Sesame Street and Live from Lincoln Center.

She produced and directed Meeting with a Killer: One Family's Journey (2001 Emmy Award nominee) for Court TV; Life Afterlife, a 90-minute Special for HBO; The Secret Life of Barbie (1999 Emmy Award winner) for ABC News; Addicted and Why Am I Gay? for HBO's America Undercover series; No Money, Mo' Problems and Smart Sex for the MTV series True Life; The Other Epidemic for ABC News; Firefighters for The Learning Channel; A Passion to Play for ABC Sports; Anatomy of a Baseball Trade for HBO Sports; segments for EGG, the PBS arts series; five episodes in the Hallmark Channel's acclaimed Adoption series, including stories shot in Siberia and Guatemala; and national PSA's for the Office for Victims of Crime. Jackson produced and directed a new documentary series about ordinary people who have won the Carnegie Medal for heroism that will air on the Hallmark Channel in 2008 and is currently working on a film about a group of displaced women living in the slums of Bogotá, Colombia.

Jackson's awards include an Emmy Award for Outstanding Informational Special ('99); a New York City Emmy ('93); three CINE Golden Eagles; four Houston International Film Festival, Gold Awards; a Silver Chris Award from the Columbus International Film Festival; a Planned Parenthood Maggie Award for Outstanding Documentary; two Gold Clarion Awards from Women in Communications; Audience Choice Awards from the Vancouver, Breckenridge and Cinequest film festivals and a Movies That Matter Award from Amnesty International. She has screened her work and lectured at the Columbia University School of Journalism, New York University, Harvard University and was a visiting professor of documentary film at the School for Visual Arts in Manhattan.

Last updated: Feb. 18, 2010