Katy Chevigny is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and a co-founder of Big Mouth Productions. Most recently, she co-directed the feature documentary E-TEAM with Ross Kauffman, which won the award for Best Cinematography 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 has produced a dozen feature-length documentaries as well as short-form films, videos and webisodes for nonprofit and corporate clients. She produced 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 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 other producing credits include Arctic Son, Nuyorican Dream, Brother Born Again, Outside Looking In: Transracial Adoption in America, and Pushing the Elephant. Her films have been shown theatrically, on HBO, Cinemax, POV, Independent Lens, NBC, Arte/ZDF, Britain’s Channel 4, and others, and have played at film festivals around the world, including Sundance, Tribeca, Full Frame, SXSW, IDFA, Sheffield and Berlin.
Visit our Filmmaker of the Month Section to see previous Filmmakers of the Month.