Filmmaker

Award-Winning Theater Director

b. November 21, 1963

“Art is a great prism through which we can understand history and current events.”

Moisés Kaufman is an award-winning theater director and playwright. His work is known for its bold, perceptive portrayals of contemporary social issues, particularly those of sexuality and culture. His groundbreaking play, “The Laramie Project,” inspired by the brutal killing of a gay college student, Mathew Shepard, generated worldwide empathy and dialogue around LGBT hate crimes.

Born in Venezuela, Kaufman grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family. As a youth, he was exposed to avant-garde theater. While working toward a business degree in Caracas, he joined an experimental theater group and toured as an actor.

In 1987 Kaufman moved to Manhattan to study theater direction at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Recognizing the originality of Kaufman’s ideas, Arthur Bartow, the university’s dean, advised him at graduation, “No one will hire you. You should start your own theater company.”

In 1991 Kaufman and his husband, Jeffrey LaHoste, founded the experimental Tectonic Theater Project, dedicated to developing consciousness-raising, innovative works that push the boundaries of theatrical language and form. In its early years, the cash-strapped troupe rehearsed in the couple’s apartment. Under Kaufman’s artistic direction, Tectonic eventually flourished. The theater company has since created and staged more than 20 plays and musicals. Many, including the “The Laramie Project,” “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde” and “33 Variations,” have garnered international acclaim.

Shortly after the murder of Mathew Shepard in 1998, Kaufman took his Manhattan-based theater company to Laramie, Wyoming, the small college town where the crime occurred. They conducted more than 400 hours of interviews with 200 local residents. Kaufman used the conversations to write and produce “The Laramie Project.” The play, which premiered in 2000, became one of the most-produced works of the decade. It has been performed worldwide in theaters and schools and used to educate people about homophobia. Kaufman also wrote and directed a screen adaptation that was released on HBO in 2002.

Kaufman has earned numerous accolades for his work, including an Obie Award for his Broadway directorial debut, “I Am My Own Wife”; two Tony Award nominations: one for “I Am My Own Wife” and one for “33 Variations”; the Outer Critics Award for “Gross Indecency”; and two Emmy nominations for “The Laramie Project.” In 2009 President Obama invited Kaufman and Techtonic to witness the signing of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. In 2016 President Obama presented Kauffman with the National Medal of Arts.

Oscar-Winning Director

b. April 6, 1955

“[Filmmaking] gave me the opportunity to speak to the world.”

Rob Epstein is an American film director, writer and producer, and the cofounder of the production company Telling Pictures. Best known for his groundbreaking feature-length documentaries, he is the first openly gay director to win an Oscar for an LGBT-themed film.

Epstein was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey. At age 19, he moved to San Francisco. He started his career as one of the six-member Mariposa Film Group. Mariposa created “Word Is Out: Stories From Some of Our Lives” (1977), the first feature-length documentary by and for LGBT Americans. The pioneering film aired nationally in theaters and on primetime public television, increasing visibility for the gay community during a transformative period in the LGBT rights movement.

Epstein conceived, directed and co-produced his next project, “The Times of Harvey Milk" (1985), about the slain gay San Francisco board supervisor. Premiering at the Telluride and New York film festivals, the film touched audiences worldwide. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, along with Peabody, Emmy and Sundance Awards. It made Epstein the first openly gay director to win an Oscar for an LGBT-themed movie. In 2013 the Library of Congress selected “The Times of Harvey Milk” for the National Film Registry. The prestigious Criterion Collection also includes it in their catalog.

In 1987 Epstein and his husband, Jeffrey Friedman, founded Telling Pictures, a San Francisco-based production company. Together they produced “Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt” (1985), an HBO documentary about the AIDS epidemic, for which Epstein won a Peabody and his second Academy Award. Their box-office hit, “The Celluloid Closet” (1995), a retrospective of LGBT images in Hollywood, featuring interviews with luminaries such as Tom Hanks and Whoopie Goldberg, won a Peabody and an Emmy Award. Other acclaimed films by Epstein and Friedman include “End Game” (2018), “State of Pride” (2019) and “Paragraph 175” (2000). Shifting from documentary to biopic, the duo also collaborated on “Lovelace” (2013), starring Amanda Seyfried, Peter Sarsgaard and Sharon Stone, about the porn star Linda Lovelace, and “HOWL” (2015), starring James Franco as the famous gay poet Allen Ginsberg.

In addition to filmmaking, Epstein is a professor and co-chair of the film program at California College of the Arts. He has served on the Sundance Institute's board of trustees and on the board of the governors of the documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In 2008 he received the Pioneer Award for distinguished lifetime achievement from the International Documentary Association.

Oscar-Winning Filmmaker

b. June 7, 1928

“[‘Call Me by Your Name’] is a story familiar to most of us, whether we’re straight or gay.”

James Ivory is an award-winning film director, producer and screenwriter. Along with film producer Ismail Merchant, his life partner, he founded the highly successful movie-making enterprise Merchant Ivory Productions. Ivory won the Academy Award for “Call Me by Your Name” (2017), a gay coming-of-age romantic drama set in 1980s Italy.

Ivory was born in Berkeley, California. He studied fine arts at the University of Oregon before attending the USC School for Cinematic Arts. The documentary he created for his master’s thesis, “Venice: Theme and Variations,” was selected by The New York Times as one of the 10 best nontheatrical films of the year.

In 1959 Ivory met Ismail Merchant at a film screening in New York. The two fell in love, and in 1961 they founded Merchant Ivory Productions. Though they initially intended to make English language films in India for the international market, they made many films set in England and the United States. For the most part, Ivory directed and Merchant produced the company’s 44 movies.

Best known for their intelligent themes and superb casting, Merchant Ivory films have garnered countless nominations and awards in the United States and Europe. The company’s most iconic pictures are based on literary works dealing with social issues. “Maurice” (1987), directed by Ivory, was one of the first movies to affirmatively depict gay relationships and became a life-changing film for many young gay men in the ’80s and ’90s. Ivory received the Academy Award nomination for Best Director for “A Room with a View” (1985), “Howards End (1992) and “The Remains of the Day” (1993).
 
Until Merchant’s death in 2015, Ivory and Merchant shared a professional and romantic relationship. Because Merchant came from a deeply conservative Indian Muslim family, the couple kept their 44-year love affair quiet. References to their personal life were made only discreetly by the press.

In 2018 at age 89, Ivory won the Academy Award and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for “Call Me by Your Name,” making him the oldest recipient in the history of either award. In his acceptance speech, he described the film as “a story familiar to most of us; whether we’re straight or gay, or somewhere in between, we’ve all gone through first love, I hope, and come out on the other side mostly intact.”

Filmmaker

b. May 13, 1966

“… There are other people with stories to tell.”

Cheryl Dunye is a Liberian-born American lesbian filmmaker, actor and educator. Her films highlight social and cultural issues surrounding African-Americans and the LGBT community, most notably, black lesbians.
 
Dunye grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Temple University and her Master of Fine Arts from Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts. In 1992 Art Matters Inc. awarded her a fellowship. The following year, her work appeared in the Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Dunye has made more than 15 films whose themes explore the intersection of race, sexuality and personal identity. Emerging as part of the Queer New Cinema movement of the 1990s, she began her career producing short film narratives. A compilation of her work from 1990 to 1994, “Early Works of Cheryl Dunye,” is available on DVD.

In 1996 Dunye wrote, directed, edited and starred in the romantic comedy-drama “The Watermelon Woman,” her first feature film and the first full-length narrative made by and about a black lesbian. It won the Teddy Award for Best Feature Film at the Berlin International Film Festival and the Audience Award for Outstanding Narrative Feature at L.A. Outfest. Her next project, “Stranger Inside” (2001), an HBO drama about black lesbian prison inmates, earned her an Independent Spirit Award nomination for best director.

Dunye’s other films include “My Baby’s Daddy (2004),” a comedy that grossed $18.5 million against a $12 million budget; “The Owls” (2010); “Mommy is Coming” (2012); and “Black is Blue” (2014), a sci-fi film set in a futuristic Oakland, California, that explores black queer transgender love.

Dunye cites American film directors Woody Allen and Spike Lee as her artistic influences and Charles Burnett’s “Killer of Sheep” (1978) as a significant source of inspiration. Her distinctive style often breaks the fourth wall: characters directly address the camera, blurring the line between the actors and the audience. Industry insiders have labeled her creative mix of fact and fiction “Dunyementary.”

In addition to filmmaking, Dunye is a professor at San Francisco State University School of Cinema. She has taught at universities from coast to coast, including UCLA and Temple University. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Among other honors, Dunye received the Community Vision Award from the National Center for Lesbian Rights in 2004 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016.

She lives in Oakland, California, with her two children.

LGBTQ Youth Advocate

b. August 3, 1968

“Finding that we do not walk alone—that’s where courage is found.”

Eliza Byard is an American historian, filmmaker and activist who leads GLSEN, an organization recognized globally as a leader in the fight for LGBTQ issues in K-12 schools.

Byard was born in New York City. Her mother was a teacher, and her father was an architect and director of the Historic Preservation Program at the Columbia University School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. Byard earned a B.A. from Yale University in 1990 and a Ph.D. in United States history from Columbia University in 2002.

Byard began working in public television at age 13, with an internship at WNET. Her career included work on numerous award-winning documentaries. “Out of the Past,” a PBS documentary on the lives and struggles of LGBTQ people throughout U.S. history, won the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, and “School Colors,” a film for FRONTLINE on segregation in public education 40 years after Brown v. Board of Education, earned an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award. Byard worked for Bill Moyers at Public Affairs Television on projects spanning more than a decade and at the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Byard joined GLSEN as deputy executive director in 2001. She became executive director in 2008, taking over from the organization’s founder, Kevin Jennings. She led the growth of GLSEN’s public education and advocacy efforts; GSA support and in-school programming; professional development training for educators; and pioneering research and evaluation capacity. She has crafted advocacy and legislative strategies that have won bipartisan support and widespread acceptance of the urgency and importance of LGBTQ issues in education. Since 2005 her work has contributed to measurable improvements in the lives of LGBTQ students across the United States. In 2010 she launched GLSEN’s international initiative, which has partnered with United Nations agencies, the World Health Organization, the World Bank and LGBTQ community-based organizations in 40 countries to spark an evidence-based revolution on LGBTQ youth issues in education.

In the 2016-17 school year, more than a million U.S. students took part in a GLSEN program or action at their schools.

Documentary Filmmaker

b. October 12, 1957
d. November 7, 2017

“We all know plenty of gay people who have won Academy Awards, but we’re all just quiet about it. I couldn’t imagine having that profound of an honor and not acknowledging my partner.” 

Debra Hill Chasnoff was an American documentary filmmaker and activist. She won the 1992 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject for “Deadly Deception.” In her acceptance speech, Chasnoff became the first Academy Award recipient to acknowledge a same-sex partner during the ceremony’s live national telecast. She came out in doing so. 

Chasnoff was born in Philadelphia and grew up in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. Her father, Joel Chasnoff, was a Maryland state legislator and her mother, Selina Sue Prosen, was a psychologist. In 1978 Chasnoff graduated with a degree in economics from Wellesley College.

Chasnoff made 12 documentary films. With her production company, GroundSpark, she produced and distributed documentaries covering social issues such as income inequality, environmental rights and LGBT rights. The company’s mission was to “create films and dynamic education campaigns that move individuals and communities to take action for a more just world.” Films like “That’s a Family” (2000) exposed students nationwide to diverse households of multiracial families and same-sex parents. 

Chasnoff’s influential first film, “Choosing Children” (1984), showcased six same-sex American couples raising children through adoption, biological donors or fostering. It won Best Short Documentary at the New York Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and First Prize from the National Educational Film Festival. The New York Times reported that the film “inspired many gay and lesbian couples to start raising families of their own.” 

In 1991 Chasnoff directed and produced “Deadly Deception: General Electric, Nuclear Weapons and Our Environment.” The exposé earned her the 1992 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject. In accepting the award, Chasnoff thanked her then partner, Kim Klausner.  

In addition to filmmaking, Chasnoff was a visiting scholar in public policy at Mills College in California. Mayor Art Agnos of San Francisco appointed her vice chair of the city’s Film and Video Arts Commission. She also served on the advisory boards of the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and the Jewish Voices for Peace organization. 

At age 60, Chasnoff died of breast cancer. She was survived by her spouse Nancy Otto, an artist and nonprofit fundraiser, and two sons from her relationship with Klausner. The New York Times published Chasnoff’s obituary.

Immigration Activist 

b. February 3, 1981 

“I am an American. I just don’t have the right papers.”

Jose Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a filmmaker and an immigration rights activist. He founded Define American, a nonprofit organization dedicated to immigration and citizenship issues, and launched #EmergingUS, a digital platform that focuses on race, immigration and identity. 

Born in the Philippines, Vargas came to the United States when he was 12. He revealed his status as an undocumented immigrant in a 2011 essay in The New York Times Magazine in an effort to promote dialog about the U.S. immigration system and to advocate for the DREAM act. 

Vargas took an interest in journalism in high school. Before college he worked as a copy boy for The San Francisco Chronicle, eventually earning a private scholarship after being turned down for financial aid because he was undocumented. He graduated from San Francisco State and for years kept his status secret for fear of being deported. 

Vargas came out in high school after seeing a documentary about Harvey Milk, the assassinated openly gay San Francisco politician. He later described the disclosure as “less daunting than coming out about my legal status.” 

Vargas’s public immigration advocacy began with his revelatory 2011 essay. The following year, he wrote a cover story on his experience for TIME. He went on to direct a documentary called “Documented,” which premiered at the AFI Docs film festival in 2013. It was released in theaters and broadcast on CNN in 2014. The same year, Vargas was arrested in the border town of McAllen, Texas, after 21 years in the United States. He was questioned for hours, but then released.

In 2015 “Documented” earned an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Documentary and Vargas produced a television special, as part of MTV’s “Look Different” campaign, called “White People. The program examined what it means to be young and white in America.

Vargas has written extensively for publications such as Rolling Stone and The New Yorker and was a senior contributing editor at the Huffington Post. As a Washington Post staffer, his 2006 series on HIV/AIDS in Washington, D.C., inspired the documentary film, “The Other City,” which he wrote and co-produced. It premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival and aired on Showtime. Vargas was also part of the Washington Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech. 

Vargas has discussed his experiences as a gay undocumented immigrant on such diverse television shows as “The O’Reilly Factor” and “Real Time with Bill Maher.” He has received numerous honors, including the Freedom to Write Award from the PEN Center.

Filmmaker

“If I can encourage adjustments or a wider sphere of thoughts or questioning, then I will feel that I’ve done something.”

Arthur Dong is an Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker best known for chronicling Asian-American history and LGBT life. He earned an Oscar nomination in 1984 for “Sewing Woman,” about his mother’s immigration to America from China, which he produced as film student at San Francisco State University. As a result of the film’s success, he founded DeepFocus Productions to produce, direct and write projects close to his heart.

“Stories from the War on Homosexuality” (2005), Dong’s first DVD collection, features a trilogy of films focused on gay issues, including “Coming Out Under Fire” (1994), his Peabody Award-winning documentary about World War II policies impacting gay and lesbian service members; “Licensed to Kill” (1997), a study of convicted murderers of gay men; and “Family Fundamentals” (2002), a look at conservative Christian families with gay children.

Dong’s 2007 documentary “Hollywood Chinese” was featured on the PBS series “American Masters” in 2009. The film is included in his second DVD collection, “Stories from Chinese America,” which was released in 2010.

In the early 1990s, Dong produced 13 documentaries for Los Angeles' KCET-TV’s “Life & Times." For the first national PBS series about gay issues, “The Question of Equality,” he directed the episode, “Out Rage ’69,” about New York’s famous Stonewall Riots—the uprisings that helped galvanize the modern LGBT civil rights movement.

Along with other recognition, Dong has received three Sundance Film Festival Awards and five Emmy nominations. He has also received two GLAAD Media Awards and the OUT 100 Award for his work on “Licensed to Kill.”

In 2014 Dong turned his research for the film "Forbidden City, USA” into a book, which recieved the 2015 American Book Award. Most recently, he released his latest film, "The Killing Fields of Dr. Haing S. Ngor," and was appointed Distinguished Professor in Film at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

Actor and Director

b. April 21, 1963, El Paso, Texas

“Rock and roll and theatre and drag are all the same thing. They’re ways to remind yourself that you’re not alone.”

John Cameron Mitchell is best known for writing, directing and starring in the cult classic film “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”

While the story of Hedwig is not autobiographical, the sexually ambiguous character—the lead singer in a fictional rock band—does share some traits with her creator. Like Hedwig, who is from East Germany and spent her youth craving the freedom of the West, Mitchell used to visit his military father in Berlin and became haunted by the Berlin wall. Hedwig, like Mitchell, is a performer with an insatiable passion for the stage. Both are perennial outsiders making their own way—idealists who transcend labels. Hedwig confounds male and female identities and Mitchell is an out gay man who believes gays are on the verge of selling out as they assimilate into society. Hedwig and Mitchell teach us to distrust appearances because true character comes from the inside out.

In 2008 Mitchell established a New York nightclub called Mattachine. It was located at Julius, the nation’s oldest known gay bar. Mattachine was an homage to activists who convened at Julius in 1966 to hold a “sip-in” protest of the State Liquor Authority’s regulation prohibiting bartenders from serving homosexuals.

In 1998 Mitchell’s rock musical, “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” debuted Off-Broadway and won an Obie Award. Mitchell played the lead role for seven shows a week. In 2001 he directed and starred in the film version, for which he earned the Best Director Award at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actor. The film garnered a cult following. In 2014 a revival of “Hedwig” opened on Broadway with Neil Patrick Harris cast in the leading role. Mitchell also wrote, directed and produced the film “Shortbus” and directed “Rabbit Hole,” starring Nicole Kidman.

Movie Director

b. December 24, 1959, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

“I don't work with fear, and I don't work with actors that are fearful.”

Lee Daniels is an Academy Award nominated producer, director, screenwriter and actor.

Daniels survived a traumatic childhood. After being caught wearing his mother’s pumps, he was violently assaulted by his father. Daniels stated, “When I came out it was because I loathed my dad so much.”

Torment also followed Daniels to school. He was gay and black in a predominantly white school. “I was always told that I was nothing because I was gay,” he said.

At age 21, Daniels started a nurse-staffing agency, which he sold a year later. The sale made him a millionaire and allowed him to pursue his dream of working in the entertainment industry. He first worked as a casting director and later as a talent manager. He built a client base of Academy Award winners and nominees, most of whom later worked in Daniels’s films.

Daniels became a Hollywood force in 2001 when his production company released “Monster’s Ball,” a movie for which Halle Berry won the Oscar for Best Actress. Daniels later directed the film “Precious.” His experience as a sexually abused child inspired his direction of the film. “Precious” received six Academy Award nominations, including Best Director, and earned two Academy Awards.

In 2012 his film “The Paperboy,” with Nicole Kidman, was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

In 2013 Daniels directed the critically acclaimed film “The Butler,” with Oprah Winfrey, Forest Whitaker, John Cusack, Jane Fonda and Mariah Carey.