Beverly Seckinger
Beverly Seckinger is University Distinguished Outreach Professor in the School of Theatre, Film & Television and former Interim Director (2008-10) and Associate Director (2004-08, 2010-11) of the School of Media Arts. She is a founding member of the UA Committee (now Institute) for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies, and since 1993 has directed the annual Lesbian Looks Film Series. She is also the founding director of the DocScapes screening and workshop series. In 2017 she created DocVisions, a community outreach program that teaches documentary filmmaking skills to UA students from various majors, who create short films about local refugee and immigration issues, and mentor refugee and immigrant teens in media production. Seckinger also serves on the Executive Committee for the Human Rights Practice Program, and leads the graduate certificate program in Human Rights and Documentary Media.
Her most recent film Hippie Family Values, a feature-length documentary about three generations at a back-to-the-land community in rural New Mexico, won the Grand Festival Award for Documentary at the Berkeley Film Festival, the Outstanding Project Award for 2019 from the Communal Studies Association, and the Outstanding Documentary Award from the University Film & Video Association. The film has screened at community and campus venues across the country, and is distributed to educational institutions by New Day Films.
Seckinger’s previous films have been shown on PBS, at international festivals in the US, Europe, Canada, Australia and Latin America, and non-theatrically throughout the U.S. Her 2004 documentary Laramie Inside Out, about the aftermath of Matthew Shepard's 1998 murder in her Wyoming hometown, had its U.S. broadcast premiere on PBS in 2007, and is distributed by New Day Films, Filmoption/Canada, and American Public Television. The film has been screened at dozens of universities, conferences and community events across the country, and purchased for the permanent collections of more than 400 colleges and universities.
Working as a collective with four collaborators, her current project is a feature documentary profiling the work of four longtime human rights activists at the forefront of immigration justice organizing in Southern Arizona: public defense attorneys Isabel Garcia and Margo Cowan, and professors/historians Guadalupe Castillo and Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith.
Seckinger has been a member of New Day Films, the leading filmmaker-owned distribution company for social issue documentaries, since 2004, and served as head of the Web Operations team (2014-16) and as Head of Promotions (2010-12). She is also a longtime member and former officer and board member of the University Film & Video Association.
She spent four years in Morocco, first as a Peace Corps Volunteer English teacher (1981-83), and then as a researcher on the Morocco Literacy Project for the University of Pennsylvania (1985-86). She later served as a USAID-Women in Development consultant in Tunisia (1993, 1994).