Judith Dwan Hallet (Judy Hallet) is an award-winning documentary filmmaker who has been making films for more than 45 years. After graduating from college in 1964, Judy joined the Peace Corps where she made a film with her then future husband, Stanley Hallet on the Berber Villages of Southern Tunisia. After directing several more independent films with her architect/filmmaker husband, including two documentaries in Afghanistan, Judy became a Producer/Reporter at the NBC affiliate station in Salt Lake City. Over the next 14 years, she produced nearly 100 news documentaries.
Judy moved to Washington in 1986 to work for National Geographic Television as the Senior Producer for their weekly television series, Explorer. After nearly five years at National Geographic, overseeing more than 60 documentaries and producing four of her own, Judy formed her own company, Judith Dwan Hallet Productions, LLC, where she produced and directed fourteen award-winning television documentaries.
In 1995, Women in Film and Video awarded her the Woman of Vision Creative Excellence Award. In 2001 she received The Mayor’s Arts Award for Excellence in an Artistic Discipline by the Washington, D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. In 2008 she received an Emmy from The National Capital Chesapeake Bay Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in recognition for her significant contributions to the broadcast industry.
This year, Judy and her husband Stanley produced the documentary Tale of the Tongs, which follows the story of Catholic University architecture professor Travis Price and his students building an architectural memorial on the island of Inishturk, Ireland over nine days in 2013. The film interweaves the process of construction with profiles of people who live on the island, their culture and landscape. It was the first time in more than forty years that they have made a film together. Judy believes it is the beginning of a new collaboration.
At the moment, Judy is completing a book on her life as a woman documentary filmmaker. A memoir focusing on her experiences out in the field in Africa, South America, Indonesia, Europe and Afghanistan.
Over her career, Judy has produced films in seventeen countries around the world on subjects as diverse as an obscure tribe living in tree houses in the rainforest of Irian Jaya, Indonesia, to gauchos in Argentina, to biographies on Jane Goodall and Pope John Paul II.
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