Academy Award Nominee Ginny Durrin Receives Filmmaker of the Month Distinction
The District of Columbia Office of Motion Picture and Television Development (MPTD) is honored to recognize Ginny Durrin, award-winning documentary filmmaker and founder of Durrin Productions, Inc., as the March 2013 Filmmaker of the Month. She has received national and international recognition for her distinctive stylistic documentaries, including an Academy Award nomination and an Emmy for Promises to Keep, a documentary about Mitch Snyder and the homeless living in Washington, DC.
Ginny is the president and owner of Durrin Productions, Inc., an award-winning 40 year-old Washington, DC film and video company. For more than four decades, the firm's production arm has created social issue media for broadcast and a wide variety of clients.
Broadcast credits include Homegrown: Islam in Prison about radical Islam in our prisons (Part of the PBS series, America at a Crossroads), Poisons and Plagues for the Ted Turner PBS series, and award-winning documentaries Worker to Worker and Can’t Take No More on PBS. Her independent films have appeared nationally in prime time on PBS and have been broadcast on foreign outlets, including the BBC. Her films have been shown at the Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Shanghai, London, Leipzig, and Munich film festivals.
Her current project is Bombs in Our Backyard, about the deadly contamination of a prominent Washington, DC neighborhood, Spring Valley, from buried WWI chemical weapons. She has been documenting the story in her neighborhood for 20 years, and the show is now in post-production.
Ginny Durrin has traveled and filmed internationally in such diverse places as Kurdistan, Iraq, England, Ireland, Japan and Honduras. She began her career as a Peace Corps volunteer, serving in Bogota, Colombia as an educational television producer-director. She has a strong ability to establish a rapport with her subjects and to capture their stories in a personal and compelling way.
Ginny is a member and founding president of Women in Film & Video, Washington, DC and a member of the Association for Independent Video and Film makers among other organizations. She has received a number of awards and recognition including four Blue Ribbons in the American Film and Video Festival, numerous CINE Golden Eagles, and the President’s Award from Women in Film & Video. She currently lives in Ward 3 of the District of Columbia.
The DC Film Office launched the Filmmaker of the Month initiative to feature a District-based filmmaker who exemplifies the vast amount of talent and creativity based here in the nation’s capital. The Filmmaker of the Month initiative is part of its mission to elevate the national and international profile of the city’s most talented filmmakers. Previous filmmakers honored include award-winning writer and director of Vivian, Aimee Dixon; Ben Crosbie, award-winning documentary filmmaker and co-founder of Eidolon Films; Tendani Mpulubusi El, creator and director of documentary People Past and Present: Hillsdale; and Lance Kramer, documentary filmmaker and a co-founder of Meridian Hill Pictures.
View Previously Featured Filmmakers to learn more about Ginny and other Filmmaker of the Month recipients.