GOOD TALK WITH JAN KRAWITZ
Jan Krawitz directs documentaries that explore eclectic topics. Her films have been exhibited at festivals in the U.S. and abroad, including Sundance, the New York Film Festival, Visions du Réel, Edinburgh, AFI Docs, London, Sydney International Film Festival, Full Frame, and SXSW (South by Southwest). Her latest film, PERFECT STRANGERS, follows an altruistic kidney donor on an unpredictable, four-year journey of twists and turns. It won the Audience Award at several film festivals and was broadcast in two successive years on the national PBS series America Reframed. Krawitz’s previous film, Big Enough, poignantly reveals the emotional and physical challenges faced by several dwarfs as they attempt to live in an average-sized world. The participants in this film first appeared in Krawitz's co-directed documentary, Little People, released 20 years earlier. Her documentaries, Mirror Mirror, In Harm’s Way, Little People, and Drive-in Blues received wide educational distribution, extensive press, and sizable audiences on national PBS. Jan's short film Styx is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Little People was an Emmy nominee for "Outstanding Individual Documentary" and Krawitz and her co-director were featured on NPR’s All Things Considered when it premiered at The New York Film Festival.
Krawitz has had one-woman retrospectives and guest lectured at the Portland Art Museum, Hood Museum of Art, Rice Media Center, Austin Film Society, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. She has lectured internationally at conferences, universities, and film festivals, including Princeton, Hunter, Dartmouth, Radcliffe, Oxford University, Vassar, International Film School (Cologne), Beijing Film Academy, Wake Forest, the American Film Institute, among other venues. She has twice been selected for the Southern Circuit -- screening her films and lecturing at venues in South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. Krawitz is the recipient of artist residencies at Yaddo, Docs in Progress, and the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy. She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and is currently a voting member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Krawitz was a Professor in the MFA Program in Documentary Film at Stanford where she taught for 34 years.