Leah Mahan

Leah Mahan is a documentary filmmaker whose work has been nominated by the Directors Guild of America for Outstanding Directorial Achievement. Her independent films have aired on PBS and have been supported by the Sundance Institute, Independent Television Service and Ford Foundation. She has been a Fellow at Sundance Documentary Editing and Story Lab and Sundance Stories of Change, a Research Fellow with the Center for Environmental Filmmaking at American University. Her film Sweet Old Song (2002) aired on the PBS series P.O.V. and was selected by Roger Ebert for his Overlooked Film Festival. She served as U.S. Film Envoy for the American Film Showcase, traveling to Indonesia with Come Hell or High Water: The Battle for Turkey Creek (2013), which aired on the PBS World series America ReFramed. Leah got her start as an intern for filmmaker Henry Hampton on the PBS series Eyes on the Prize and her first film was Holding Ground: The Rebirth of Dudley Street (1996). She co-produced and directed Holding Ground”and its sequel, Gaining Ground, with filmmaker Mark Lipman. She was Senior Producer for the podcast But Next Time and was co-producer of the feature documentary Skin of Glass. In addition to her independent work, Leah serves as a documentary film writer and story consultant and has been a reviewer for the California Humanities’ California Documentary Project and a lecturer in the Social Documentation M.F.A. program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She holds a BA in anthropology from Cornell University and a Masters of Fine Arts in Cinema from San Francisco State University.