Lisa Leeman has been directing and producing award-winning feature documentaries for 35 years. Her cinematic portraits, shot over many years, illuminate contemporary social issues through intimate character-driven stories that follow people at critical turning points in their lives. Roger Ebert cited Leeman’s One Lucky Elephant as one of the best documentaries of 2011. Other acclaimed films include Out of Faith, Who Needs Sleep (with Haskell Wexler), Awake, and Crazy Wisdom.
Her films have been distributed worldwide, supported by Sundance, Catapult, the Producers Guild, AFI, NEA, and California Humanities. She is a member of the Motion Picture Academy and a tenured professor and endowed chair at University of Southern California, where she teaches documentary filmmaking and cinematic ethics. She also writes articles about the ethics and craft of documentary filmmaking and chairs the Documentary Producers Alliance Ethics subcommittee.
At MacDowell, Leeman wrote and edited new sequences for her feature documentary Walk by Me, including scenes inspired by a fellow MacDowell Fellow's memoir. The film is a portrait of a transgender artist’s life over the course of 30 years and is a follow-up to her groundbreaking first documentary, Metamorphosis (Sundance Filmmakers Trophy; POV/PBS, 1990). Filmed over a span if eight years, Walk by Me weaves the past and present to explore aging, art and resiliency, faith, friendship, and the blurred boundaries in documentary filmmaking. She has been awarded an upcoming Bogliasco Fellowship for her work on the film. Her stay at MacDowell also reignited her first artistic passion, photography, and she experimented with new manipulations in still photographs while in residence.
Portrait by Vince Gonzales
