Laurie Kahn

Founder, Blueberry Hill Productions

I started as a print journalist, fell in love with film while studying philosophy at Oxford, and learned my craft as a filmmaker working on three first-rate documentary film series based in Boston: Eyes on the Prize, Frontline, and American Experience.

After working on these PBS series, I wanted to experiment with the form of documentaries, and created my own production company in the early 1990s. My first film, A Midwife’s Tale (based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book), begins as a documentary with the historian, Laurel Ulrich, who stumbled on the massive but cryptic diary of an 18th century midwife. As Ulrich pieces together the life of the diary-keeper, Martha Ballard, the film gradually evolves into a drama, taking us into Ballard’s world.

A Midwife’s Tale won a primetime Emmy for Outstanding Non-Fiction and numerous awards at film festivals. Since then, I’ve made award-winning films, websites, and multi-platform projects.  DoHistory.org, a path-breaking website, won awards for innovation; TUPPERWARE! received the George Foster Peabody Award and a Best Directing primetime Emmy nomination; videos I created about older women and HIV have been used by the NIH; and my film, Love Between the Covers, has received five stars at Netflix, iTunes, and Amazon. That film is part of the multi-platform project I directed, the Popular Romance Project, which includes a 2015 conference at the Library of Congress (What is Love? Romance Fiction in the Digital Age), a large website (PopularRomanceProject.org), and a program of nationwide library screenings. 

My films have been screened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the Rhode Island School of Design, the DGA and many other major institutions. They have been broadcast around the world and used widely in university classrooms and community groups.

I’ve taught at Northeastern University, Brandeis, Tufts, and Harvard, and I’ve been a scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis since 2003. I’ve also served on numerous juries for film festivals and media funders like the National Endowment for the Humanities.

I’m currently transitioning into the world of dramatic writing. I’ve got two big projects now. I’m developing a nine-part limited dramatic series (Jerrie Cobb & the Mercury 13) based on the true story of 13 intrepid female pilots at the dawn of the Space Age. And I’m writing the dialogue (“the book”) for a musical about Brownie Wise and the Tupperware Ladies she empowered – based on my Tupperware documentary.

My cinematic influences come from both the documentary and feature film worlds. And my tastes are very broad. Most importantly, I love films that immerse their viewers in another time and place, making one aware that the past is simultaneously a foreign and an uncannily familiar place. I respect films that find a visual/aural palette that is organically appropriate to the subject of the film. And I am committed to telling stories that have not been told, but deserve to be – stories that allow us to see history from the bottom up, rather than from the top down.