Ellen Spiro

Ellen Spiro is a professor of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas in Austin and a boundary-pushing documentary filmmaker. Her work champions mavericks and renegades with wit, delight, and emotional depth. Her documentaries include Diana’s Hair Ego, Greetings From Out Here, Roam Sweet Home, Atomic Ed & the Black Hole, Are the Kids Alright?, Troop 1500, Fixing the Future and, co-directed with Phil Donahue, Body of War, shortlisted for an Academy Award. Emerging as a visual artist during post graduate work within the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, Spiro’s films are today found in permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, UCLA Film and Television Archive, the Peabody Collection of the Paley Center for Media, and the New York Public Library. She has ben awarded fellowships from Guggenheim, Rockefeller and National Endowment for the Arts. She also has won two Gracie Awards for Outstanding Director and Outstanding Documentary for Troop 1500, from the Foundation of American Women in Radio and Television. Spiro studied at the University of Virginia, and earned her Master’s Degree in Media Studies at S.U.N.Y Buffalo. Her films have been broadcast and premiered in prestigious film festivals around the world.