Johanna Hamilton is an award-winning director/producer whose work explores cultural, political and historical stories by focusing on the human experience. In 2007, she worked with Abigail Disney and Gini Reticker to co-produce PRAY THE DEVIL BACK TO HELL, the account of a group of brave and visionary women who demanded peace for Liberia, a nation torn to shreds by a decades old civil war. It won Best Documentary at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival and was short-listed for an Academy Award. The film is broadly credited with helping lead figure, Leymah Gbowee, win the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize. Subsequent to that, she directed and produced Sundance-supported 1971, a feature documentary about a group of citizens that broke into a small FBI office outside Philadelphia that revealed the existence of COINTELPRO, a massive illegal surveillance operation. Never caught, the burglars revealed themselves for the first time in the film. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, won the IDA’s ABC News VideoSource award and Cinema Eye’s Spotlight Award, and was nominated for an Emmy after airing on PBS’s Independent Lens. Hamilton contributed to PARCHED, a The National Geographic Channel series about the politics of water, executive produced by Alex Gibney. She recently completed production on WRONG MAN, a series for STARZ on wrongful convictions, co-directed with Joe Berlinger. She is currently at work on two short films with Field of Vision. Hamilton has produced non-fiction programming for PBS, the Washington Post/Newsweek Productions and New York Times Television, amongst others.
