Liane Brandon

Liane Brandon is an award winning independent filmmaker, photographer and University of Massachusetts/Amherst Professor Emerita. She was one of the first independent women filmmakers to emerge from the Women's Movement.

During that time she was a member of Newsreel film collective and Bread and Roses, one of the earliest women's liberation groups in Boston. She was also a founding member of FilmWomen of Boston and Boston Film/Video Foundation. She is one of the four founders of New Day Films.

Brandon’s groundbreaking films Sometimes I Wonder Who I Am (1970) Anything You Want To Be (1971) and Betty Tells Her Story (1972) were among the earliest and most frequently used consciousness raising tools of the Women's Movement. Her films, which also include Once Upon A Choice and How To Prevent A Nuclear War have won numerous national and international awards, and have been featured on HBO, Cinemax, and the Criterion Channel. They have twice received Blue Ribbons at the American Film Festival, and have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Tribeca Film Festival and at the legendary Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge, MA.

Anything You Want To Be and Betty Tells Her Story have been restored with grants from the Women’s Film Preservation Fund. Recent screenings of the restored films include The Barbican Centre in London, Metrograph and UnionDocs in NY, Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Glasgow Film Theatre in Scotland, The Royal Institute for Theatre in Brussels, and colleges and universities across the country. Betty Tells Her Story was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2022

Currently working as a photographer, her still photography credits include Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive (PBS American Masters), Typhoid Mary: The Most Dangerous Woman in America (PBS Nova), Unsolved Mysteries, The Powder & the Glory, Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women (PBS American Masters) and Murder at Harvard (PBS American Experience). Her photos have been published in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal and many other publications, as well as featured in gallery exhibits.

Brandon is the recipient of the Boston Society of Film Critics Award and the Distinguished Alumni Award from Boston University. She has served as a juror for the Emmy Awards, the Evvy Awards, the student Academy Awards and as an education consultant for WGBH -TV. She was named Pioneer Woman Filmmaker by CineWomen of New York.

Brandon’s work has been profiled in The Boston Globe, International Documentary Magazine, Variety, The Chicago Tribune, Film Library Quarterly, Documentary Storytelling for Film, Videomakers and many other publications.

In addition to her role as Professor at the University of Massachusetts, she was the Director of UMass Educational Television which produced award winning, original educational programming for cable/home audiences throughout New England. The twelve original series (50 half-hour episodes) were carried by local and regional cable, and were seen in over 40 cities and towns in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Actively involved with the rights of media artists, her lawsuit (Brandon v. The Regents of the University of California) won a landmark victory for filmmakers' protection of their titles.

Before becoming a filmmaker, Brandon experimented with several short careers, working as a ski instructor, file clerk, high school teacher and professional stunt woman.