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), BLUE VINYL (for which she and Co-Director Daniel Gold were 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 co-founded Working Films in 1999, a national organization dedicated to leveraging the power and reach of documentaries to strategically support long-term social change.  She speaks widely and passionately about this work in North America and internationally, and is full-time faculty at New York University’s Undergraduate School of Film and Television.

Helfand and Daniel Gold’s Toxic Comedy Pictures is a production company with a social conscience and a sense of humor. Their next feature documentary, MELTING PLANET, is a ‘toxic comedy’ about global warming and human nature.