Filmmakers

GORDON QUINN is a co-founder of Kartemquin Films, where over the past 50+ years he has helped hundreds of documentary filmmakers advance their projects forward and been a leading champion of the rights of all documentary filmmakers. He is the 2015 recipient of the International Documentary Association Career Achievement Award and was a key leader in creating the Documentary Filmmakers Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use. His credits as director and producer include films as diverse and essential as “‘63 Boycott” (2017), “Inquiring Nuns” (1966), “Golub” (1988), and “A Good Man” (2011), and as executive producer include Academy-Award nominated films “Minding the Gap” (2018), “Abacus: Small Enough to Jail” (2016), “Hoop Dreams” (1994), and the Emmy Award-winning “The Interrupters” (2011), “The Trials of Muhammad Ali” (2013), “The Homestretch” (2014), and “Life Itself” (2014), and the acclaimed limited series “The New Americans” (2003) and “Hard Earned” (2015).

HOWARD REICH is an Emmy award-winning filmmaker; Reich covered music and the arts for the Chicago Tribune from 1978 to 2021. He has written six books: “The Art of Inventing Hope: Intimate Conversations with Elie Wiesel,” “Portraits in Jazz,” “Let Freedom Swing,” “Jelly’s Blues” (with William Gaines), “Van Cliburn” and “Prisoner of Her Past” (originally published as “The First and Final Nightmare of Sonia Reich”). The latter inspired the Kartemquin documentary film “Prisoner of Her Past” (broadcast nationally on PBS), which Reich wrote, narrated and produced. He has served on the jury for the Pulitzer Prize in Music four times, including the first time a jazz work won: Wynton Marsalis’ “Blood on the Fields.” Reich holds two honorary doctorate degrees and has won two Deems Taylor Awards from ASCAP; Alumni Merit Award from Northwestern University; Bravo Award from Dominican University; Anne Keegan Award and eight Peter Lisagor Awards from the Society of Professional Journalists; an Excellence in Journalism Award from the Chicago Association of Black Journalists; and the Public Advocacy Award from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. The Chicago Journalists Association named him Chicago Journalist of the Year in 2011 and has given him three Sarah Brown Boyden Awards.

Joanna Rudnick is an Emmy-nominated director with over two decades of experience directing and producing documentaries. All of Joanna’s films engage with ideas of family, the importance of the arts in society, human health and wellness, social justice, and youth issues. Joanna’s first feature documentary In the Family (PBS|POV) took a personal look at the effect that testing positive for the breast and ovarian cancer mutation had on her and several others as well as the bioethical implications of the new medical technology. The film was broadcast in over a dozen countries, shown on Capitol Hill and used in a Supreme Court case brought by the ACLU on gene patents. Joanna directed the animated short Brother (Independent Lens|PBS); the Chicago Film Festival Audience Award winning short On Beauty (Shorts TV) and an episode of duPont award-winning Hard Earned (Al Jazeera America). Her producing credits include the Emmy-award winning Robert Capa in Love and War (PBS|BBC); Crossfire Hurricane (HBO); Bill T. Jones: A Good Man (American Masters|PBS); and Prisoner of Her Past (PBS). Joanna has a masters degree in Science, Health, and Environmental Journalism.

Jerry Blumenthal (1936-2014) worked as a maker on a team that made HSA Strike ’75 (Kartemquin, 1975) in Chicago. He was one of the founders of Kartemquin, working with them until his death in 2014. He began as one of the makers of Shulie (1966), the groundbreaking film about Shulamith Firestone. His film, Golub: Late Works are the Catastrophes (2004), revisited the great American artist thirteen years after the award-winning Golub (1988). Vietnam, Long Time Coming (made with Gordon Quinn, Peter Gilbert, and Adam Singer) aired on NBC, earning a national Emmy and the Directors Guild of America Award for Best Documentary of 1999. Among his over twenty-five films, Blumenthal listed The Chicago Maternity Center Story (1976), The Last Pullman Car (1983), Taylor Chain (1980), Taylor Chair II: A Story of Collective Bargaining (1984), and the Palestinian story in Kartemquin’s seven-hour PBS series, The New Americans (2004) as the most personally and politically significant.