The District of Columbia Office of Motion Picture and Television Development (MPTD) is pleased to honor Grace Guggenheim, Academy award-winning documentarian, as the January 2014 Filmmaker of the Month. Grace Guggenheim has been a producer and executive producer of historical documentaries with Guggenheim Productions, Inc. for more than twenty-five years and has produced more than fifteen documentaries for television and theatrical release for permanent exhibition at museums and presidential libraries around the country.
Grace is president of Guggenheim Productions, Inc.® overseeing and managing the preservation of her late father, documentarian Charles Guggenheim’s fifty year legacy. She advises the programming committee for The Charles Guggenheim Center for Documentary Film located at the National Archives in Washington, DC, now in its ninth year of screening all Academy Award®-nominated documentaries.
Her credits include: Producer of The Man Nobody Knew, a portrait about the seminal American Spymaster William Colby, Berga: Soldiers of Another War, a little known story about 350 American soldiers trapped in the tragedy of the holocaust, , Harry S. Truman: 1884 -1972, a film biography of President Truman; Executive Producer of the Academy Award®-nominated
A Place in the Land, for The Woodstock Foundation in Woodstock, Vermont; Executive Producer of the Academy Award®-nominated D-Day Remembered, for the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana and the “American Experience” series on PBS; and Senior Producer of both the theatrically released 1989 Academy Award® -winning film, The Johnstown Flood, and the 1992 expanded version, which was televised on the "American Experience." Other credits include Clear Pictures, a biography of the novelist Reynolds Price; LBJ: A Remembrance, the story of Lyndon Johnson; and A Life: The Story of Lady Bird Johnson, a biography of the former First Lady.
Grace is a part-time professor with the University of California DC campus arts elective program and she has been a guest lecturer at Stanford Law School, Scripps and Goucher College, and has participated in U.S. Department of State feature film cultural programs in South Africa and in Egypt. Additionally, she serves as a member of the Advisory Committee for the Environmental Film Festival in the nation’s capital.
Her current and third 2k digital restoration project is a film directed by her late father called Monument to the Dream, the 1967 Academy Award® Nominee documentary which captures the struggle and heroism of the men who built America’s Gateway Arch, the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. This film has played in the visitor’s center for more than 45 years in film and will continue in Digital Cinema in 2014.
Her professional affiliations have included Women in Film and Video and The American Institute of Architects. She also was a recipient of the WIFV 2010 Women of Vision Award.
Grace graduated from Carleton College and currently lives in Ward 3 of the District of Columbia.
MPTD 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 Stone Soup Films founder Liz Norton; People Past and Present: Hillsdale creator and director Tendani Mpulubusi El; Time Traveling Media Founder Lawrence Green; and Double R Productions founder Rosemary Reed.
You can visit the Filmmaker of the Month section to learn more about Grace and previous Filmmaker of the Month recipients.