Ariel Dougherty to Receive Award

Ariel Dougherty will be receiving one of the 2022 Women and Media Awards from WIFP at our 50th Anniversary celebration October 23rd, coming to Washington, DC, from New Mexico. As a filmmaker, for almost five decades, Ariel Dougherty has been a leader in the independent and feminist film & cultural communities. 

Teacher, producer, and mentor, she has encouraged hundreds of women directed films to completion and to reach a wide and varied audience. Among these works are FEAR, a short by Jean Shaw produced in a community workshop setting to Lynn Hershman’s WOMEN, ART, REVOLUTION!, for which Ariel raised a single $100,000 contribution. She has written scores of articles about the intersection of women’s rights, funding, and media & cultural policy. She co-lead creation of a Women’s Media Policy in November 2011 at National Council on Women’s Organizations. 

As National Director of Media Equity Collaborative, 2007-2013, she surveyed the field of women centered media to enlarge their support before the donor community. An administrator at the East Hampton, NY public access facility Ariel created the Producer’s group, and she also anchored her own show, CUTURAL DEMOCRACY/ECOLOGY. Always an innovator and visionary, she initiated, TARTS/Teaching Artists to Reach Technological Savvy, a 1984 Apple funded network of four women’s arts organizations. Development director of Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY, she curated the series, “Women’s Work in film & Video”. She was integral to the revolutionary project, International VIDEOLETTERS, a monthly video exchange among 26 women’s media groups from fourteen feminist communities across the US. 

In 1969 Ariel co-initiated Women Make Movies, first as a production arm of the Women’s Liberation Movement and was incorporated in 1972. A community based media teaching workshop was the heart of its original program with distribution as a critical earned income program. Today the organization is the globe’s largest distributor of women’s films and one of the most self-sustaining organizations to emerge from the women’s liberation movement. 

Currently Ariel is completing a book about 26 contemporary girl/women/lesbian community based film teaching programs, with a look back to the parallel projects from the 1970s. With Sheila Paige, her WMM co-founder, she is working to bring their early films like SWEET BANANAS, WOMEN’S HAPPY TIME COMMUNE and SURVIVA and the workshop films before new audiences today. @MediaEquity