Jennifer Redfearn

Introduction (2-3 lines)

Jennifer Redfearn is an Academy Award nominated documentary director and producer.

Jennifer Redfearn is an Academy Award nominated documentary director, whose immersive style of filmmaking examines how political, environmental and cultural forces impact on individual lives.

She directed and produced the 2011 Academy Award nominated film, Sun Come Up, about a small island community losing their homeland to rising seas. Sun Come Up screened on HBO after a successful theatrical run in thirty U.S. cities. Her recent film, Tocando La Luz (Touch the Light), tells the story of three blind Cuban women and their fight for independence. It premiered at the Full Frame Documentary Festival where it won the Charles E. Guggenheim Award.

Recent career highlights also include field directing the 2015 SXSW audience award winner, Landfill Harmonic, and producing several short documentaries, multimedia films, and interactives for MediaStorm. Projects she produced and edited at MediaStorm were nominated for the World Press Photo and Webby awards in the multimedia and documentary categories.

Jennifer has received a fellowship from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Fork Films, Jerome Foundation, Chicken & Egg Pictures, NYSCA, and NYWIFT. Her films have been supported by ITVS, IFP, and the Hot Docs Forum.

She holds a B.A. from Wellesley College and an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University. She has taught documentary filmmaking at Columbia University and NYU.

New Day Films by Jennifer Redfearn

Awards & Accolades

Fork Films, Development Grant, 2016
Charles E. Guggenheim Award for Tocando la Luz, 2015
NYWIFT Loreen Arbus Disability Awareness Grant, 2014
ITVS Co-Production, 2014
National Endowment for the Arts, Media Arts Grant, 2013
New York State Council on the Arts, Individual Artist’s Grant, 2012
New York State Council on the Arts, Distribution Grant, 2010
Academy Award Nomination, Director, 2011
Jerome Foundation, Individual Media Artist’s Grant, 2010
Chicken and Egg, Which Came First Fund, 2010
New York State Council on the Arts, Individual Artist’s Grant, 2009
Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting Fellowship, 2008
Opens in new window