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Judith Helfand, a filmmaker who won a Sundance Excellence Award for Blue Vinyl, a “toxic comedy” documentary that explores the dangers of PVC plastic, has been named the 2024-2025 Affiliate Scholar by the Women’s Institute at Russell Sage College.
Affiliate Scholars are selected based on accomplishments that show a commitment to the advancement of women and social equity. They visit campus for events and programs that they help arrange and promote, leveraging their expertise and connections.
Helfand is best known for her openhearted, artfully self-deprecating, and radically transparent approach to nonfiction storytelling, addressing a number of important topics in her films, from reproductive technology to the political aspects of a deadly Chicago heat wave. Her Peabody Award-winning film, A Healthy Baby Girl, will be screened at the Opalka Gallery at Russell Sage’s Albany campus on September 12 at 7 p.m. A conversation with Helfand will follow the film.
“We are thrilled to welcome Judith as the 2024-2025 visiting Affiliate Scholar,” said Shelly Calabrese, director of the Women’s Institute at Russell Sage. “Her work with the Institute will focus on the art of documentary filmmaking and activism and the power it holds to affect social and political change. We will host a variety of public programs throughout the year and work with faculty to develop a supplementary curriculum, which will explore the vital role this form of art plays in shaping society, shifting cultural perspectives, and amplifying marginalized voices.”
A Healthy Baby Girl, broadcast on the PBS series POV in 1997, was a five-year video diary about how the drug diethylstilbestrol (DES), given to Helfand’s mother in 1963 to prevent miscarriage and ensure a healthy baby, led to Helfand’s DES-related cervical cancer diagnosis at age 25. The film explores mother-daughter love, family renewal, survival, political awakening, and community activism.
”I want all people to make that connection between their health, the environment and corporate greed,” Helfand told The New York Times in a 1997 article on the film, ”so that the DES story won’t be replicated over and over again.”
Storyteller and activist, Helfand’s 2020 film, Cooked: Survival by Zip Code, focuses on a 1995 Chicago heat wave, where 739 Chicagoans died in a single week, most of them poor, elderly, and African American. Her latest feature documentary, Love & Stuff, is a multi-generational love story about what it is we really need to leave our children.
As much a committed nonfiction field-builder as a filmmaker, Judith co-founded Working Films, which supports documentaries that address social justice and environmental protection, and Chicken & Egg Pictures, which provides funding, mentorship, and industry access to the global community of women and gender-expansive filmmakers.
Over the years, Helfand has become recognized as a renowned teacher, mentor, storytelling and editorial consultant, “title/naming queen,” and pitch trainer. She’s designed, trained, and moderated pitching events for a range of institutions, graduate students, and filmmakers, from emerging to veteran. Those events include Chicken & Egg Picture’s Sheffield Film Festival Live Pitch, the Jewish Film Institute’s “Pitch & Kvell,” the Athena Film Festivals’ annual Doc Pitch, which focuses on films-in-progress that explore and feature women’s leadership on screen, and most recently “Pitch & Launch,” a bespoke pitching training program and industry on-ramp designed for recent Craig Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY grads and their capstone shorts.
Her teaching career started when her mentor George Stoney asked her to teach one of his most beloved production classes at NYU’s undergraduate Film and TV program, which evolved into many years of teaching full time.
In addition to a Peabody and two Emmy Nominations, accolades include the 2024 George C. Stoney Award for Outstanding Documentary Work (UFVA); 2019 Jewish Film Institute’s Freedom of Expression Award; NARAL’s 2011 Champion of Change Award for Chicken & Egg Pictures’ Reel Productive Justice; a 2007 USA Artists Fellowship; and major support from The Ford Foundation’s JustFilms, The MacArthur Foundation, Sundance Film Institute, and the Columbia/Stanford Brown Institute for Media Innovation. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Documentary Branch.