Lisa Molomot, Documentary Filmmaker
bio
Since graduating from the American Film Institute, I have worked as a documentary director, producer and editor. My films have aired on the PBS series Independent Lens and American Reframed and have been seen at film festivals around the world, including Sundance, SXSW, New Directors, New Films and DOC NYC.
My recent feature documentary MISSING IN BROOKS COUNTY about the migrant death crisis along the U.S./Mexico border won a Peabody Award as well as 20 film festival awards and was nominated for a Critics Choice Documentary Award and was a finalist for the Dupont-Columbia University Award for outstanding journalism. The film received funding from PBS and is Executive Produced by Abigail Disney. MIBC was released theatrically in the summer of 2021 and aired on the PBS series Independent Lens in January 2022. It has broadcast on PBS stations around the country over 3,000 times and continues to have a robust impact campaign in places like Washington D.C., Texas, Cuba and Mexico.
I spent the spring of 2019 on a Fulbright Scholarship in Toronto working on the award-winning documentaries SAFE HAVEN (2020) about U.S. war resisters seeking asylum in Canada and SOLEDAD (2020) about an asylum case. Both films are currently screening around North America and available for purchase through the film collective New Day Films where I serve on the steering committee.
Some of my other films about the Southwest are the award-winning shorts TEACHING IN ARIZONA (2018) and THE CLEANERS (2017).
My 2013 directing debut THE HILL, about the demolition of a mostly African-American neighborhood in New Haven, CT, a city I lived in for 12 years, premiered on America Reframed and won best documentary at Greenpoint Film Festival and received an honorable mention for the Paul Robeson Award.
My 2014 film SCHOOL’S OUT, about a forest kindergarten near Zurich, Switzerland, premiered on the PBS series Natural Heroes, won best short at several film festivals, and was written about on Slate.com and in The Atlantic and National Geographic. With screenings at over 100 film festivals and public screenings around the world, SCHOOL’S OUT sparked a movement among early childhood educators to set up their own versions of an outdoor kindergarten.
I have taught filmmaking at Yale University, Wesleyan University, Colorado College, Trinity College and currently at the School of Theatre, Film and Television, the Human Rights Practice Program and the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona. I am also affiliate faculty of the Latin American Studies Program there.
I was recently granted a Poynter Fellowship in Journalism at Yale University, and I am currently working on a series of shorts documentaries and a feature about archaeology and history in Tucson, where I have been living for the past 9 years.
