Charlotte Lagarde

Introduction (2-3 lines)

Director Charlotte Lagarde has been making documentary films since 1991, intimate portraits of people and places. Her love of the ocean led her to document magnificent women surfers in her award-winning short films ZEUF and SWELL. Her documentary about the Hawaiian surfing legend, Rell Sunn, HEART OF THE SEA, was broadcast in over 30 countries and won numerous awards including the 2003 PBS Independent Lens Audience Award and Best Documentary Award at the Ashland Independent Film Festival.

Born in France, Charlotte Lagarde is an artist, filmmaker and entrepreneur. Her work has aired on PBS, the Sundance Channel, HBO, and been exhibited at MASS MoCA and ICA-VCU. She is a Sundance, BAVC, Yerba Buena Arts Center and Camargo Foundation fellow.

Her latest project, Su Hui's Picture of the Turning Sphere, a five channel video installation made in collaboration with artist Jen Bervin, premiered in 2020 at The University Galleries at Illinois State University. Lagarde's short film, Jen Bervin’s Silk Poems, premiered at MASS MoCA and has been exhibited in Tbilisi, Georgia and Hong Kong. Lagarde's participatory project Colonial White premiered in the exhibit The Racial Imaginary Institute: On Whiteness at The Kitchen and was in the exhibit Great Force at the ICU-VCA in 2019.

Lagarde studied documentary film at Stanford and has made over twenty films. The feature-length documentary she directed about the Hawaiian surfing legend, Rell Sunn, Heart of the Sea, was broadcast in over 30 countries and won numerous awards including the PBS Independent Lens Audience Award and Best Documentary at the Ashland Independent Film Festival. Her most recent documentary The Ballad of Fred Hersch premiered at the 2016 Full Frame Film Festival.Her producing credits include Shaleece Haas’ Real Boy (PBS/IL 2017), Deann Borshay Liem’s Geographies of Kinship (2019) and In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee (PBS/POV 2010) and Carrie Lozano’s Academy award-winning Reporter Zero, which premiered at the 2006 Berlin International Film Festival.

In 2019, Lagarde co-founded B.PUBLIC, a Public Benefit Corporation that addresses climate change and the housing crisis by offering high performance building systems that reduce carbon emission by 90%.

Born in France, Charlotte Lagarde is an artist, filmmaker and entrepreneur. Her work has aired on PBS, the Sundance Channel, HBO, and been exhibited at MASS MoCA and ICA-VCU. She is a Sundance, BAVC, Yerba Buena Arts Center and Camargo Foundation fellow.

Her latest project, Su Hui's Picture of the Turning Sphere, a five channel video installation made in collaboration with artist Jen Bervin, premiered in 2020 at The University Galleries at Illinois State University in the exhibition Jen Bervin: Shift Rotate Reflect, Selected Works (1997-2020). Lagarde's short film, Jen Bervin’s Silk Poems, premiered in the exhibition Explode Every Day: an Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder at MASS MoCA and has been exhibited in Tbilisi, Georgia and Hong Kong. Lagarde's participatory project Colonial White premiered in the exhibit The Racial Imaginary Institute: On Whiteness at The Kitchen and was in the exhibit Great Force at the ICU-VCA in 2019.

Lagarde studied documentary film at Stanford and has made over twenty films. The feature-length documentary she directed about the Hawaiian surfing legend, Rell Sunn, Heart of the Sea, was broadcast in over 30 countries and won numerous awards including the PBS Independent Lens Audience Award and Best Documentary at the Ashland Independent Film Festival. Her most recent documentary The Ballad of Fred Hersch premiered at the 2016 Full Frame Film Festival.Her producing credits include Shaleece Haas’ Real Boy (PBS/IL 2017), Deann Borshay Liem’s Geographies of Kinship (2019) and In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee (PBS/POV 2010) and Carrie Lozano’s Academy award-winning Reporter Zero, which premiered at the 2006 Berlin International Film Festival.

​In 2019, Lagarde co-founded B.PUBLIC, a Public Benefit Corporation that addresses climate change and the housing crisis by offering high performance building systems that reduce carbon emission by 90%.

New Day Films by Charlotte Lagarde

Awards & Accolades

2016 Camargo Foundation Core Fellow
2014 Filmmaker Artist in Residence at Proteus Gowanus, Brooklyn
2011 Featured Artist, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco
2008 Fellow at Bay Area Video Coalition Producer Institute, San Francisco
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