Sep 8, 2014 – The UNC Communication Studies Department is happy to announce the hire of award-winning documentary filmmaker Julia Haslett as assistant professor.
“As Department Chair, I am so pleased to announce Professor Haslett’s appointment. Not only does she bring a wealth of teaching and administrative experience to her new position teaching documentary production here at Carolina; she also is an award-winning documentarian who is bound to enrich the intellectual life of our department,” said Ken Hillis.
Haslett’s most recent film, An Encounter with Simone Weil, premiered at IDFA in Amsterdam and won Michael Moore’s Special Founder’s Prize at the Traverse City Film Festival. Moore called it “a profound and moving film on a woman who continues to speak to all of us.” It was a New York Magazine Critic’s Pick during its 2012 US theatrical run.
Haslett is also producer/director of the highly acclaimed Worlds Apart series about cross-cultural medicine, and producer of the companion hour-long documentary Hold Your Breath (PBS 2007). Her documentary shorts Hurt & Save, Flooded, Eclipsed, and Pure & Simple have screened at numerous festivals and galleries, including Full Frame, Black Maria, and Rooftop Films.
She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the IFP Documentary Lab, and her work has been supported by the Vital Projects Fund, the Greenwall Foundation, and the Florence Gould Foundation, among many others. She has worked at WGBH-Boston, the Discovery Channel, and as a Filmmaker-in-Residence at the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics.
Haslett got her B.A. from Swarthmore College and her M.F.A. in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College (CUNY) in 2011. From 2013–2014, she was a Visiting Associate Professor and Head of Film & Video Production in The University of Iowa’s Department of Cinematic Arts. She was born in London.