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Women’s Institute Affiliate Scholars are selected based on accomplishments that show a commitment to the advancement of women and social equity. They visit campus for events and programs they help arrange and promote, leveraging their expertise and connections.
2024-2025 Affiliate Scholar: Judith Helfrand
Judith Helfand, a filmmaker who won a Sundance Excellence Award for Blue Vinyl, a “toxic comedy” documentary that explores the dangers of PVC plastic, has been named the 2024-2025 Affiliate Scholar by the Women’s Institute at Russell Sage College.
Helfand is best known for her openhearted, artfully self-deprecating, and radically transparent approach to nonfiction storytelling, addressing a number of important topics in her films, from reproductive technology to the political aspects of a deadly Chicago heat wave.
A Healthy Baby Girl, broadcast on the PBS series POV in 1997, was a five-year video diary about how the drug diethylstilbestrol (DES), given to Helfand’s mother in 1963 to prevent miscarriage and ensure a healthy baby, led to Helfand’s DES-related cervical cancer diagnosis at age 25. The film explores mother-daughter love, family renewal, survival, political awakening, and community activism.
Storyteller and activist, Helfand’s 2020 film, Cooked: Survival by Zip Code, focuses on a 1995 Chicago heat wave, where 739 Chicagoans died in a single week, most of them poor, elderly, and African American. Her latest feature documentary, Love & Stuff, is a multi-generational love story about what it is we really need to leave our children.
As much a committed nonfiction field-builder as a filmmaker, Judith co-founded Working Films, which supports documentaries that address social justice and environmental protection, and Chicken & Egg Pictures, which provides funding, mentorship, and industry access to the global community of women and gender-expansive filmmakers.
Over the years, Helfand has become recognized as a renowned teacher, mentor, storytelling and editorial consultant, “title/naming queen,” and pitch trainer. She’s designed, trained, and moderated pitching events for a range of institutions, graduate students, and filmmakers, from emerging to veteran. Those events include Chicken & Egg Picture’s Sheffield Film Festival Live Pitch, the Jewish Film Institute’s “Pitch & Kvell,” the Athena Film Festivals’ annual Doc Pitch, which focuses on films-in-progress that explore and feature women’s leadership on screen, and most recently “Pitch & Launch,” a bespoke pitching training program and industry on-ramp designed for recent Craig Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY grads and their capstone shorts.
Her teaching career started when her mentor George Stoney asked her to teach one of his most beloved production classes at NYU’s undergraduate Film and TV program, which evolved into many years of teaching full time.
In addition to a Peabody and two Emmy Nominations, accolades include the 2024 George C. Stoney Award for Outstanding Documentary Work (UFVA); 2019 Jewish Film Institute’s Freedom of Expression Award; NARAL’s 2011 Champion of Change Award for Chicken & Egg Pictures’ Reel Productive Justice; a 2007 USA Artists Fellowship; and major support from The Ford Foundation’s JustFilms, The MacArthur Foundation, Sundance Film Institute, and the Columbia/Stanford Brown Institute for Media Innovation. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Documentary Branch.
