The District of Columbia Office of Motion Picture and Television Development (MPTD) is pleased to honor Katy Chevigny, award-winning filmmaker and founder of Big Mouth Productions, as the December Filmmaker of the Month. Katy, with more than 15 years of experience in the industry, has produced a dozen feature-length documentaries as well as short-form films, videos and webisodes for nonprofit and corporate clients. Her films have been shown theatrically, on HBO, Cinemax, POV, Independent Lens, NBC, and others, and have played at film festivals around the world, including Sundance, Tribeca, and SXSW.
Most recently, Katy co-directed the feature documentary E-TEAM with Ross Kauffman, which won the Best Cinematography award at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2014 and was released as a Netflix Original in October 2014. She also produced the upcoming documentary 1971, directed by Johanna Hamilton, which will be released theatrically and broadcast on PBS in 2015.
Katy began her film career in Chicago, where she volunteered to carry a tripod for a variety of documentary and fiction film projects and learned how to make movies on the job. In 1997, she moved to New York and co-founded Big Mouth Productions with her college friend Julia Pimsleur. Her first film was a documentary Innocent Until Proven Guilty about the D.C. Public Defenders Office.
Katy’s production credits also include Election Day (2007), which followed 11 people in 11 different locations around the country as they took part in casting a vote that day. The film premiered at the South By Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival in 2007 and was broadcast on PBS in 2008. With Kirsten Johnson, she co-directed Deadline, an investigation into Illinois Governor George Ryan's commutation of death sentences. After premiering at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, Deadline was broadcast on NBC to an audience of more than six million, in an unusual acquisition of an independent film by a major network. It was nominated for an Emmy Award and won the Thurgood Marshall Journalism Award, among others.
Katy is currently directing an installment of the forthcoming Al Jazeera America series HARD EARNED, which explores the lives of five American families struggling to get by in today's economy. She currently resides 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 MPTD’s mission to elevate the national and international profile of the city’s most talented filmmakers. Previous filmmakers honored include The New “N” Word web series Double R Productions Founder Rosemary Reed, Fort Bliss associate producer Michael Hardy, Vivian director and writer Aimee Dixon, and Fate of a Salesman director and Eidolon Films co-founder Ben Crosbie.
You can visit the Filmmaker of the Month section to learn more about Katy and previous Filmmaker of the Month recipients.