Leah began working in the documentary field in 1988 as a research assistant for filmmaker Henry Hampton on the acclaimed PBS series EYES ON THE PRIZE. 

DIRECTOR

Leah’s film COME HELL OR HIGH WATER: THE BATTLE FOR TURKEY CREEK (2013), a story about climate justice in Mississippi, aired on the PBS World series America ReFramed. Her film SWEET OLD SONG (2002) aired on the PBS series P.O.V. and was selected by Roger Ebert for his Overlooked Film Festival. Leah’s first film was HOLDING GROUND: THE REBIRTH OF DUDLEY STREET (1996). Her work has been supported by the Sundance Institute, Independent Television Service, Ford Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Chicken & Egg Pictures and Fledgling Fund.

PRODUCER

Leah is Senior Producer and Editor of BUT NEXT TIME, a limited-run podcast in which listeners travel with community advocates as they uncover hard-won lessons from people experiencing California wildfires and Texas storms, finding ways to forge a more just and equitable future. The podcast is part of RISE-HOME STORIES, a groundbreaking collaboration between multimedia storytellers and social justice advocates seeking to change our relationship to land, home, and race, by transforming the stories we tell about them.

Leah is Co-producer of SKIN OF GLASS, a feature documentary about the tumultuous recent history of Brazil, through the story of a São Paulo skyscraper that was occupied by hundreds of squatters before it caught fire and collapsed in 2018.

She is Co-Creator of THE GUS NEWPORT PROJECT, which aims to learn from and share the teachings of an American treasure, Eugene “Gus” Newport. The multimedia project will capture Gus’ unique contributions to numerous social movements and carry his legacy forward as a resource for future generations.

WRITER

Leah has served as a writer for a number of award-winning documentary filmmakers, producing treatments and proposals that have garnered support from competitive grant programs including the International Documentary Association Enterprise Fund and the Independent Television Service (ITVS). 

TEACHER

Leah holds an M.F.A. in Cinema from San Francisco State University and has served as a lecturer in the Social Documentation M.F.A. program at the University of California, Santa Cruz and as Research Fellow with the Center for Environmental Filmmaking at American University. She has been an invited speaker and seminar leader at a number of universities including U.C. Berkeley College of Environmental Design, Bennett College, Warren Wilson College, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, and Humboldt University. She has taught seminars on using documentary skills to advance social change, including presentations to grantees of the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation and the Annie E. Casey Foundation and graduate urban studies students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

CONSULTANT

Leah has served as a Storytelling Fellow for the Sundance Institute Stories of Change Labs at the Sundance Institute and Skoll World Forum in Oxford, England. She has worked with the ALLIANCE for Media Arts and Culture as a consulting producer and narrative mentor, with the RISE-HOME STORIES project as a narrative mentor and provided story-based strategy consulting to the Moving Forward Network. This work has been informed by her extensive outreach and engagement work on her own films and the community-based journalism project Bridge The Gulf. The impact of her first film, HOLDING GROUND: THE REBIRTH OF DUDLEY STREET, was so far-reaching within the community development field that the Ford Foundation included the film in a study of its most successful documentary funding in the previous 25 years. 

PRESENTER

Leah has been an invited speaker at numerous film festivals and schools. She served as U.S. Film Envoy for the American Film Showcase on a tour of Indonesia during which she taught workshops and led discussions with independent filmmakers, journalists and students. Working Films invited her to make a number of presentations on a tour of colleges and universities in North Carolina and she has done virtual presentations, including a webinar hosted by Interfaith Power & Light. She gained experience pitching independent film and media projects at Good Pitch and Hot Docs, where her team won the First Look prize, and has been invited to serve as a pitch mentor to participants in the Bay Area Video Coalition’s MediaMaker program. 

JUROR / REVIEWER

Leah has been invited several times to serve as a proposal reviewer for the California Humanities’ California Documentary Project. She has served on film festival juries and awards committees including the New Orleans Film Festival (Juror for Louisiana Feature) and San Francisco Green Film Festival (Guest Curator of IMPACT Film Forum and Juror for Green Fire Award).

PHOTOS ON THIS SITE: Courtesy the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, the Evans family, Elisa Haber, John McMurtrie, Lolita Parker Jr. and London Parker-McWhorter.