NEW DAY FILMS BY
Pamela Briggs:

Funny Ladies: A Portrait of Women Cartoonists

Women of Mystery

Pamela Beere Briggs is the award-winning producer/writer/director/editor of the documentary films Women of Mystery: Three Writers Who Forever Changed Detective Fiction and Funny Ladies: A Portrait of Women Cartoonists. Above and beyond the typical film screenings, Women of Mystery has inspired a highly popular screening-reading-discussion program that has been hosted in numerous public libraries across the country. Funny Ladies: A Portrait of Women Cartoonists, which profiles four American newspaper cartoonists, demonstrates the power of images and words to communicate story, fantasy, political statement and poetry. Funny Ladies aired on PBS and The Learning Channel, Ovation and Oxygen, and has been called "splendid," "delectable," "delightful," and "a film you wish would never end" by such publications as the Los Angeles Times, Ms., Boston Globe, and The San Francisco Examiner. She also made the award-winning short narrative film, Out of the Rain, inspired by her experience as a volunteer crisis counselor, which stars the nationally-recognized playwright/actor Anna Deveare Smith.

Since being awarded her M.F.A. in Film Production from UCLA in 1990, Pamela has blended her filmmaking with teaching in film school classrooms as well as community workshops. From 1994-2000, she taught film editing, production, directing and writing for the documentary film in the Loyola Marymount University graduate film production program.

The recipient of numerous awards, including grants from state humanities councils in California, Illinois, Kansas, Iowa and Colorado, her work has been covered in newspapers, magazines and on radio. In 1989 she was one of nine women across the country to be selected for a Women's Research & Education Institute Congressional Fellowship on Women and Public Policy and worked for Congresswoman Pat Schroeder in Washington, D.C. In 2002, she was recognized as a role model by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and was invited to teach a one-week workshop on visual storytelling. In 2003, she was invited by the Kentucky Arts Council to be one of their art fellowship panelists.

She has written articles and essays for The Los Angeles Times, Release Print, and International Documentary, which explore cultural, feminist, and social documentaries. Born in Kobe, Japan, she continues to pursue her Japanese language studies and is writing a collection of short stories inspired by her experiences with cultural confusion and identity.