Rachel Lears

Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award

Rachel Lears's most recent feature documentary, Knock Down the House, follows four working-class women challenging political machines across the US, and premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2019 where it won the Audience Award for US Documentary and the Festival Favorite Award. Knock Down the House is distributed by Netflix. Her last feature, The Hand That Feeds (co-directed with Robin Blotnick) was nominated for an Emmy in 2017, broadcast on PBS, and won awards and recognition at Full Frame, DOC NYC, AFI Docs, and other festivals on the 2014-15 circuit. Her video art collaborations with artist Saya Woolfalk have screened at galleries and museums worldwide since 2008. Rachel was a 2013 Sundance Creative Producing Fellow and holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology and a graduate certificate in Culture and Media from NYU, and a BA in Music from Yale. She’s also the mother of a three-year-old son.