Biography

Winner of the 1991 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the 1994 National Emmy Award for best interview program, Allie Light writes, directs and produces documentary films with her partner, Irving Saraf. Her credits include: Rachel’s Daughters: Searching for the Causes of Breast Cancer (HBO), Dialogues With Madwomen (Emmy Award; Freedom of Expression Award, Sundance Film Festival); In The Shadow Of The Stars (Academy Award); Mitsuye and Nellie, Asian American Poets; Visions of Paradise (five films about folk artists); Shakespeare’s Children (produced by Kate Kline May); Blind Spot: Murder by Women; Children and Asthma and Good Food, Bad Food, Obesity in American Children (programs about children’s health & the environment); An Iraqi Lullaby and The Sermons of Sister Jane, and Believing the Unbelievable. Her most recent work is Empress Hotel, released in 2009. Allie has published a book of poems, The Glittering Cave and edited an anthology of women’s writings, Poetry From Violence. Her essays appear in publications about women. Ms. Light lectured in film at City College of San Francisco and, for ten years, in the Women Studies Program at San Francisco State University. Her life story appears in On Women Turning 50, Celebrating Mid-Life Discoveries, by Cathleen Rountree (Harper/Collins, 1993), and interviews with Allie are in Film Fatales: Independent Women Directors, by Judith M. Redding & Victoria A. Brownworth (Seal Press, 1997) and Documentary Filmmakers Speak by Liz Stubbs (Allworth Press, 2002). Allie has served on the Media Advisory Panel for the National Endowment for the Arts and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.