Workshop: Producing Documentaries with Emmy-winner Laurens Grant

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Learn about producing documentaries on revolutionary social movements—both past and present—from a master of the craft. In partnership with the Halifax Black Film Festival, WIFT-AT is thrilled to offer a workshop with acclaimed producer Laurens Grant on producing documentary.

Laurens is a 3-time Emmy and a Peabody award-winning filmmaker and a Sundance Institute filmmaker fellow. Among Laurens' significant accomplishments, she directed and produced the documentary Stay Woke: The Black Lives Matter Movement which is Executive Produced by actor and activist Jesse Williams [Grey's Anatomy] and received an NAACP Image Award nomination for outstanding news special. Laurens produced the feature length documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution which premiered at Sundance and was named one of the top five documentaries of 2015 by the National Board of Review. She also produced the documentary Freedom Riders which premiered at Sundance, won three Primetime Emmys, and a Peabody.

Laurens is also a consulting producer on the documentary The Rape of Recy Taylor which received a human rights award at its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival / Biennale di Venezia. The film, directed by Nancy Buirski, recounts the harrowing tale of Recy Taylor, an African-American woman who was gang raped by 6 white men in 1940s rural Alabama and spoke up to named her attackers and lived to tell the tale. Taylor died recently at 97; just three days shy of her 98th birthday. At the 2018 Golden Globe Awards, while accepting the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award, Oprah Winfrey discussed and brought awareness to Taylor's story. The film will open the 2nd annual Halifax Black Film Festival on March 2, 2018 as an Atlantic Premiere.