Liz Garbus

Liz Garbus is one of America’s most celebrated young voices in documentary filmmaking. She is the co-founder of New York City’s Moxie Firecracker Films and has created award-winning documentaries for Lifetime, A&E, Showtime, HBO, MTV, Disney, Discovery Channel, Sundance and BBC. Garbus’s body of work delves into a wide range of significant social concerns. She has been featured in print journalism nationwide and has been a guest on many shows, including, The Charlie Rose Show, CNN and The Rosie O’Donnell Show.

Among her numerous accolades, Garbus’s film The Farm won two Primetime Emmy Awards after airing on A&E, was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1998 and earned first prize from numerous film critic associations across the country. The film is a result of a three-year relationship that Garbus fostered with Louisiana Corrections official and with six men confined at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. It is an insightful and candid look inside the daily workings of the justice system and its impact on individual lives.

Garbus’s other films include The Execution of Wanda Jean, about the first black woman to be executed in America in the last fifty years; THE TRAVELERS, which looks at a group of young adults who hop freight trains from coast to coast, aired on MTV; and The Secret Life of a Serial Killer, a stunning examination of a little known murderer who preyed on gay men and whose crimes were largely ignored by law enforcement and the media. Garbus has recently completed directing a new feature-length documentary, Girl Hood, which takes viewers into the confines of the Thomas J. Waxter Children’s Center, an all-girls facility that houses Maryland?s most violent, dangerous juvenile offenders, focusing on the lives of two deeply troubled, but entirely redeemable, young women.

At the lecture podium, Garbus can address a wide array of topics that urgently impact American society, particularly judicial reform and youth issues. Not just filming her subjects, but stepping into their lives, has given Garbus a unique vantage point to address these subjects with clarity and reality-based analysis.

In January 1998, Garbus co-founded Moxie Firecracker, Inc., an independent documentary production company, with director Rory Kennedy. Garbus and Kennedy collaborated to produce and direct the short film, EPIDEMIC: AFRICA, which examines the devastating impact of AIDS on families in sub-Saharan Africa. The film was screened by the U.S. Senate. Garbus is currently directing The Nazi Officer's Wife, a feature-length documentary for A&E based on the memoir by Edith Hahn, a Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust by obtaining false identity papers and marrying a Nazi.

Garbus made her directorial debut with the Emmy-nominated film FINAL JUDGMENT: The Execution of Antonio James, which premiered on the Discovery Channel in 1996 and won the Thurgood Marshall Award, the Cine Golden Eagle and the L.A. Bar Association Award. Working closely with Wilbert Rideau, the award-winning journalist and former death row inmate who is currently serving a life sentence, Garbus recounts the last days of Louisiana’s longest death row inmate with unprecedented candor.

A versatile filmmaker, she was asked by Sundance Channel to produce an impressionistic documentary about the Sundance Film Festival. Garbus has also produced award-winning documentaries for Great Britain’s Channel Four and collaborated with internationally acclaimed feature film director Garry Marshall.

Garbus graduated Magna Cum Laude from Brown University and is a Fellow of the Soros Foundation’s Center on Crime, Communities and Culture.

Her film, Love, Marilyn, which debuted on HBO in 2013, utilized a cast of A-list actors, including Adrien Brody, Uma Thurman, and Viola Davis, reading from Monroe’s never-before-seen private writings. Her latest documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone?, premieres on Netflix on June 26th.