Filmmaker, activist and educator Judith Helfand is best known for her ability to take the dark, cynical worlds of chemical exposure and heedless corporate behavior and make them personal, resonant, highly charged, and entertaining. Her films, The Uprising of ’34 (Co-directed with George Stoney), the Sundance-award-winning Blue Vinyl (co-directed with Daniel B. Gold and nominated for two Emmy’s), and its Peabody-award-winning prequel A Healthy Baby Girl (a five-year video-diary about her experience with DES related cancer), explore home, class, corporate accountability, intergenerational relationships and the ever shrinking border between what is personal and what is a critical part of the public record.

Building on a decade of developing innovative outreach and organizing efforts around the distribution of her own films, Helfand and veteran film curator and media activist Robert West co-founded Working Films in 1999, a national organization that nearly eight years later is a leader in creating audience engagement campaigns that dynamically link high-profile non-fiction filmmaking to cutting edge social change organizing.

Producing BLUE VINYL,offered Helfand and Gold the opportunity to experiment with what they have come to call "toxic comedy" and so they co-founded Toxic Comedy Pictures, a production company dedicated to creating original, entertaining media with a social conscience and a sense of humor. Balancing the serious with the subversive, popular entertainment with corporate accountability, unexpected twists with equally unexpected turns they created what critics and audiences agreed was a crowd pleaser and for some in the green building movement — a “cult classic”!

Knowing that BLUE VINYL was playing a role in the long-term effort to transform a toxic marketplace, they stopped worrying (just a little bit) about bio-accumulation of toxic chemicals and started wondering how they could be useful in the struggle to get America to address global warming. Enter EVERYTHING’S COOL, which had its world premiere at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, followed by South by Southwest, Full Frame Film, Hot Docs and San Francisco International — it should be released in fall ‘07.

Helfand’s most recent collaboration is with Julie Parker Benello (Co-Producer on Blue Vinyl) and Wendy Ettinger (Producer of The War Room) as co-founders of Chicken & Egg Pictures, a film fund that provides financial, producing and creative support (WE BELIEVE IN YOU GRANTS) to emerging and veteran women filmmakers at strategic points in the development, completion and launch of their non-fiction and fiction films. Via this new but very vibrant venture, Helfand is mentoring a whole new generation of young women documentary makers who are passionate, tenacious and committed to making socially conscious, entertaining, cinematically and personally challenging films.

Judith speaks widely and passionately about all of this work in North America and internationally, and teaches documentary making as a full-time faculty member at New York University’s Undergraduate School of Film & Television. On leave for 2007-08 she will be Artist-in-Residence at University of Wisconsin, Madison where she will be team-teaching a production course on environmental documentary making as well as GREEN SCREEN, a critical survey of the history of environmental films non-fiction, fiction and animation. Helfand is currently developing and hoping to start production on her next feature documentary, Heat Wave: An Unnatural Disaster, about the heat wave that ravaged the city of Chicago in the summer of 1995 leaving 739 people dead the majority of them old, poor and people of color. If things work out she will be in Chicago this July 2007 living, researching and starting production.