Julia Bell Reichert was an American Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, activist, and feminist.
24 Facts About Julia Reichert
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Julia Reichert was a four-time Academy Award-nominated director, for Union Maids, Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists, The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant and American Factory.
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Julia Reichert was a two-time winner of the Primetime Emmy, a two-time nominee of the Peabody Award, and director of two films on the National Film Registry.
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Julia Reichert was the recipient of the award for Distinguished Service to Labor and Working-Class History from the Labor and Working-Class History Association.
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Julia Reichert was professor emeritus in the Department of Theatre, Dance and Motion Pictures at Wright State University.
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Julia Reichert was honored with lifetime achievement awards from the International Documentary Association, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, and the Hot Docs Film Festival.
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Julia Bell Reichert was born and raised in Bordentown Township, New Jersey.
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Julia Reichert's father Louis was a butcher and her mother Dorothy was a nurse.
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Julia Reichert was a 1964 graduate of Bordentown Regional High School.
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Julia Reichert enrolled at Antioch College in 1964, and dropped out in 1967 when she hitchhiked to California during the Summer of Love.
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Julia Reichert returned to Antioch in 1968 and graduated in 1970 with a degree in documentary arts.
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In 1968, Julia Reichert became partners in life and creative work with Jim Klein, who introduced her in 1969 to the Antioch student radio station, WYSO FM.
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Julia Reichert trained and directed about ten students and several outsiders in the writing, compiling, taping, interviewing, and announcing involved.
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In 1969, Julia Reichert created and hosted "The Single Girl" on WYSO, possibly the first openly feminist radio program in the United States.
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Julia Reichert later retitled the show "Sisters, Brothers, Lovers, Listen," feeling the word 'girl' was disrespectful.
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In 2012, Julia Reichert returned to her roots, beginning a two-year collaboration with WYSO 91.3 FM, where she learned many aspects of nonfiction storytelling in the 1960s and 70s.
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Julia Reichert has worked in both an oral history documentary tradition, blending in-depth interviews with archival footage and in a cinema verite tradition following action as it unfolds.
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Julia Reichert taught film for 28 years in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Motion Pictures at Wright State University, in Dayton Ohio.
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Julia Reichert taught courses at Antioch College and American University and has been a guest lecturer at Harvard and Yale Universities.
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Julia Reichert has served as a mentor and inspiration to dozens of contemporary documentary filmmakers.
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Julia Reichert had one child, a daughter, with Jim Klein, to whom she was married until their divorce in 1986.
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Julia Reichert was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
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Julia Reichert was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2006, and with urothelial cancer in 2018.
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Julia Reichert died from urothelial cancer at her home in Yellow Springs, Ohio, on December 1,2022, at the age of 76.