Jill Godmilow

Filmmaker Jill Godmilow began her career in 1974 with Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman, the first independently produced American documentary to enjoy extensive theatrical exhibition in the U.S.; it was broadcast in eleven countries and earned an Academy Award nomination. Her 1984 Far From Poland, on the Polish Solidarity movement, broke new ground in the documentary genre with its deconstructive approach and reenactment techniques. Waiting for the Moon, her feminist "speculative fiction" about the famous literary couple Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, was produced for PBS’s American Playhouse. It won First Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and enjoyed theatrical distribution in France, Germany, England, Australia, Sweden, and Japan.

In What Farocki Taught (1998), she produced a perfect color replica of Harun Farocki’s astute 1969 black-and-white German film Inextinguishable Fire, about the production of Napalm B by the Dow Chemical Company. The film was invited to the Whitney Biennial in 2000. In 2002 she released a three-disc DVD, Lear ’87 Archive (Condensed), on the New York City theatrical collective Mabou Mines, in rehearsals on a completely gender-reversed production of King Lear.

Jill Godmilow teaches filmmaking and critical film studies at the University of Notre Dame. She has received two Rockefeller Fellowships in addition to her Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has been supported by numerous grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Institute for the Humanities, New York State Council for the Arts, and many private foundations. In 2003, Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman, co-directed with Judy Collins, was added to the prestigious National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.

Profile photograph by Skouras pictures.