International Documentary Association (IDA) has appointed Rachel Denny as Deputy Executive Director, effective May 11, 2026. The newly created position oversees external affairs and financial strategy, reporting directly to Executive Director Dominic Asmall Willsdon. Based in New York, Denny will also lead IDA's activities on the East Coast, where more than a quarter of its members are based. Denny brings two decades of experience as a media, film, and nonprofit executive, with leadership roles at the Sundance Institute, Film at Lincoln Center, and United States Artists. She has served as an
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Updated on June 8, 2026–Safety Planning Training for Documentarians June 8, 2026 Censorship is not always overt. In fact, many democracies that openly espouse values of freedom of speech and expression often engage in more covert forms of censorship and suppression. Of late, this is what the world of independent nonfiction filmmaking has been experiencing. A film might quietly lose its funder for unspoken reasons. Individual funders are quietly pulling their names off credits for films exploring strong political themes. Streamers are either sunsetting their documentary arms or primarily
Deirdre Fishel is a social issue filmmaker whose work focuses on lives that have remained largely invisible.
IDA, in solidarity with our partners at the International Coalition for Filmmakers at Risk (ICFR), calls on the Turkish authorities to drop the accusations against filmmaker and festival organizer Rojhilat Aksoy, amid a growing crackdown on Kurdish and Armenian films and filmmakers.
Jerald B. Harkness is the President and CEO of Studio Auteur, LLC, a content creation company specializing in producing broadcast documentaries.
The Hellenic Documentary Association (Hellas Docs) has asked IDA to add our voice to their "Culture Absent" initiative, and we are glad to do so. This week, IDA joined European documentary organizations at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival to build stronger, more coordinated support for filmmakers around the world. The need for public investment in documentary — from broadcaster funding to institutional support — was a part of those conversations. Public media exists to serve the public. Documentary filmmaking is central to how societies document themselves, preserve collective memory, and
IDA announced that Jonathan Gray, attorney and producer, Susan Margolin, producer and a pioneer of digital distribution, Jennifer Tiexiera, filmmaker and co-founder of co-founders of Lady & Bird, and Katie Townsend, litigator and previous Deputy Executive Director & Legal Director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, have joined its board.
The following Glossary and Key Takeaways, organized as answers to 5 specific questions, were collected from the February 5 IDAinsight titled “Beyond the Distributor: Theatrical Exhibition for Independently-Released Films.”
Acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery jeopardizes the future of documentary filmmaking.
Late last year, IDA gathered documentary field leaders and friends, along with our Impact Circle community, at a private home in New York City for an intimate conversation about the state of our field. Raoul Peck spoke. You very likely know his work — including I Am Not Your Negro , which drew from James Baldwin’s writings to make one of the most compelling accounts of race and power in documentary, and most recently Orwell: 2+2=5 , an investigation, via George Orwell, into how authoritarianism corrodes language and reality itself. I’d had the chance to interview Raoul and producer Alex Gibney