Pam Walton

Pam lives and works in Santa Rosa California, with her partner of over 30 years, Ruth Carranza. They live at Fountaingrove Lodge. Pam Walton's award-winning documentaries tell the truth about gay and lesbian lives. She and Ruth have just finished The Lodge, a documentary about Fountaingrove Lodge, the first to offer independent and assisted living to LGBTQ seniors and their allies. See filmmaker's website for more information. PamWaltonProductions.com

Pam Walton

Producer/Director/Editor

Pam Walton is an award-winning independent documentary filmmaker. She was awarded the 2021 Whitman College Sally Rodgers Award for Lifetime Achievement for her efforts to chronicle LGBTQ lives, politics, and culture and to work to change our culture's homophobic views of gay and lesbian people. Her work looks at gay and lesbian lives in mainstream culture: in middle class neighborhoods, Out in Suburbia; in adolescence, Gay Youth; in the family, Family Values: An American Tragedy; and at the end of life, Liberty: 3 Stories about Life & Death and The Lodge. Her work has screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, at the Margaret Mead Film Festival, and has been included in the International Documentary Association’s Theatrical Documentary Showcase, which qualifies participants for consideration in the Academy Awards®. Out in Suburbia was the audience favorite documentary at the SF International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in 1989. Gay Youth received a Silver Apple from the National Educational Film and Video Festival in 1992 and was nominated for the Young Adult Library Association’s Select DVD List in 2006. Family Values was one of eight American documentaries included in the prestigious International Public Television Screening Conference (INPUT) in 1998. Liberty: 3 Stories about Life & Death was the Best Short Documentary at Cineffable, the Paris Lesbian Film Festival, and won the National Mature Media Silver Award in 2005. Raging Grannies: The Action League, completed in 2010, screened to a sold out theater and a standing ovation at Cinequest 2009 and at Frameline33. It won the 2009 National Mature Media Merit Award and an Honorable Mention at Big Muddy Film Festival. She released Triptych: 3 Women Making Art, about older women in the art world, in 2014, available though NETA. The Lodge, about the first retirement community to offer independent and assisted living to LGBTQ seniors and their allies, was released in June of 2021 and has been broadcast on PBS stations in 46 states. Her documentaries are airing on PBS member stations in major American cities and are distributed by New Day Films and Alexander Street educational media. Walton is a member in good standing of New Day Films, Inc. She has two masters degrees from Stanford University, one in Education and the other in Communication (Film & Video Production). From 1989-1999 Walton was a lecturer in the Department of Communication at Stanford.