Abigail Disney
Nacimiento : 1960-01-24, Los Angeles, California, USA
Historia
Abigail E. Disney is an Emmy-winning director and producer, philanthropist and the CEO and president of Fork Films. An active supporter of peacebuilding, she is passionate about advancing women's roles in the public sphere. Abigail's films and series focus on social issues and spotlight extraordinary people who speak truth to power.
Having grown up in a family of filmmakers, Abigail turned to documentaries when inspired to tell the story of a brave group of women who used nonviolent protests and sex strikes to bring an end to Liberia's long civil war. She and renowned filmmaker Gini Reticker made the widely acclaimed Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which is broadly credited with highlighting the achievements of Leymah Gbowee, who received a Nobel Peace Prize in 2011. Abigail and Gini went on to found Fork Films, which is known for making and funding high profile, critically acclaimed documentaries that are seen on PBS, Netflix, HBO and other major outlets.
In addition to producing original films, Fork Films awards grants to non-fiction films that promote peacebuilding, human rights and social justice with a particular emphasis on projects with women behind or in front of the camera. As of June 2017, Fork Films has awarded over $4 million to 90 documentaries including Cameraperson, Trapped, 1971, The Mask You Live In, Citizen Koch, Hot Girls Wanted, The Invisible War, and Sun Come Up. Fork Films grantees have premiered at top tier film festivals, won major awards and moved the needle on important social issues.
In 2009, Abigail founded Peace is Loud, a nonprofit that inspires action through media and live events that spotlight women leaders on the frontline of peacebuilding worldwide.
Abigail's directorial debut, Emmy-winning The Armor of Light, co-directed by Kathleen Hughes, premiered at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival. The film follows Reverend Rob Schenck, an Evangelical minister, and Lucy McBath, the mother of a teenage shooting victim, who ask, is it possible to be both pro-gun and pro-life? Peace is Loud led the outreach and engagement campaign for The Armor of Light to restore a moral, ethical, and theological framework to the conversation about gun violence in America. The campaign has initiated and supported dialogue with faith leaders and communities around the country, reaching out beyond the documentary film community to target dozens of conservative evangelical influencers.
In 2012, along with Pamela Hogan and Gini Reticker, Abigail created and executive produced the first-of-its-kind series for PBS- Women, War, & Peace. The five-part series looked at women in modern war as active agents for peace and positive change makers in their communities. It garnered the Overseas Press Club's Edward R. Murrow Award, a Gracie Award, and a Television Academy Honor. Season II of the series is currently in production.
Abigail is the recipient of numerous awards including an honor by the International Women's Media Foundation for advancing women's issues and peace initiatives; IDA's Amicus Award, The International Advocate for Peace Award, presented by Cardozo Law School; and the Epic Award presented by The White House Project.
Disney received her Bachelor's degree from Yale University, her Master's degree from Stanford University and her Doctorate from Columbia University. She is a mother of four.
Executive Producer
Two sisters are abruptly separated, the eldest, Hasna, struggles to find her identity and place in the world.
Executive Producer
Esta investigación explora cómo el diseño de las tomas cinematográficas puede contribuir al abuso y agresión sexual, así como a la discriminación laboral que enfrentan las mujeres en la industria del cine.
Story
Abigail Disney looks at America's dysfunctional and unequal economy and asks why the American Dream has worked for the wealthy, yet is a nightmare for people born with less. As a way to imagine a more equitable future, Disney uses her family's story to explore how this systemic injustice took hold.
Self
Abigail Disney looks at America's dysfunctional and unequal economy and asks why the American Dream has worked for the wealthy, yet is a nightmare for people born with less. As a way to imagine a more equitable future, Disney uses her family's story to explore how this systemic injustice took hold.
Producer
Abigail Disney looks at America's dysfunctional and unequal economy and asks why the American Dream has worked for the wealthy, yet is a nightmare for people born with less. As a way to imagine a more equitable future, Disney uses her family's story to explore how this systemic injustice took hold.
Director
Abigail Disney looks at America's dysfunctional and unequal economy and asks why the American Dream has worked for the wealthy, yet is a nightmare for people born with less. As a way to imagine a more equitable future, Disney uses her family's story to explore how this systemic injustice took hold.
Executive Producer
Artist, activist, and single mother, Lydia Emily, defies a crippling diagnosis and unforgiving healthcare system in a film about one woman’s will to survive.
Executive Producer
La historia sigue a un grupo de aves en un viaje en el que intentan encontrar una vida mejor para ellos y para sus seres queridos.
Executive Producer
A rousing portrait of feminist writer Andrea Dworkin, one of the most controversial and misunderstood figures of the 20th century, who fought passionately for justice and equality for women.
Executive Producer
As a wave of anti-boycott legislation has swept through the country, so has a counter-wave in defense of freedom of speech. Everyday Americans are challenging these laws for their constitutionality in a nation-wide battle likely to go all the way to the Supreme Court.
Executive Producer
A group of pioneering nuns bravely stand up to the Catholic Church patriarchy, fighting for their livelihoods, convictions and equality against an all-powerful Cardinal. From marching in Selma in 1965 to the Women’s March in 2018, these women have reshaped our society with their bold acts of defiance.
Executive Producer
In a forgotten pocket of Southern Ohio where American manufacturing and opportunity are drying up, a determined young woman finds a ticket out when she is accepted to college. Alongside her older brother, Ruth Avery joins a dangerous scrap metal crew in order to pay her way. Together, they spend one brutal winter working the scrap yards during the day and stealing valuable metal from the once thriving factories by night. With her goal in sight, Ruth finds that the ultimate cost of an education for a girl like her may be more than she bargained for, and she soon finds herself torn between a promising future and the family she would leave behind.
Executive Producer
Van Jones navigates increasingly tense and isolating political and racial divides in his attempt to become a “bridge builder” during the Trump administration.
Co-Executive Producer
A state of secrets and a ruthless hunt for whistleblowers – this is the story of 25-year-old Reality Winner who disclosed a document about Russian election interference to the media and became the number one leak target of the Trump administration.
Co-Executive Producer
David Osit’s thought-provoking documentary is a real-life political saga following Musa Hadid, the Christian mayor of Ramallah, during his second term in office.
Executive Producer
Missing in Brooks County follows the journey of two families who have come to Brooks County to look for their loved ones who went missing. As they search for answers, they encounter a haunted land where death is a part of everyday life. A gripping documentary mystery, it is also a deeply humane portrait of the law enforcement agents, human rights workers, and activists who come face to face with the life and death consequences of a broken system.
Executive Producer
Una investigación sobre cómo las legendarias historias de Hollywood han influido profundamente en cómo se sienten los estadounidenses sobre las personas transgénero y cómo se les ha enseñado a las personas transgénero a sentirse sobre sí mismas.
Executive Producer
In 2016, Stacie is barely scraping by in the small city of Rutland, Vermont. Manufacturing jobs have moved out, the opioid crisis has moved in and the working poor are at their breaking point. Stacie collects bottles to stretch her husband’s unemployment benefits, while she raises her kids and keeps herself off heroin. So when Rutland’s mayor takes the controversial step of accepting 100 Syrian refugees as part of his economic diversification plan, Stacie is torn. With so few jobs and government resources available to the people who already live there, residents begin to split along xenophobic and compassionate lines. Invalidated all her life for her poverty and addiction, Stacie could just as easily succumb to the white rage that crystallizes around her as identify with the intense daily struggles she shares with the incoming refugees. Nuanced and passionate, this fascinating look at a town divided reveals an unlikely hero caught in a flashpoint of Trump’s America.
Executive Producer
Jane, recién graduada universitaria y aspirante a productora de cine, consigue un trabajo aparentemente ideal como ayudante de un poderoso ejecutivo de la industria del entretenimiento. Su jornada laboral de secretariado no es muy distinta de la de sus colegas: preparar café, cambiar el papel en la fotocopiadora, pedir el almuerzo, organizar viajes, tomar recados o atender llamadas. Pero con el paso del tiempo, va dándose cuenta del abuso que colorea insidiosamente cada aspecto de su jornada laboral, una acumulación de degradaciones contra las cuales Jane decide plantarse, quizás solo para descubrir la verdadera magnitud del problema en el que se ha involucrado.
Executive Producer
In this timely and fearless personal documentary, director Ofra Bloch engages with the people she was raised to hate and dismiss. Seen as a victim in one context and a perpetrator in the next, the film points towards a future – an “afterward” – that attempts to live with the truths of history in order to make sense of the present.
Executive Producer
Filmmaker Judith Helfand's searing investigation into the politics of “disaster” – by way of the deadly 1995 Chicago heat wave, in which 739 residents perished (mostly Black and living in the city’s poorest neighborhoods).
Executive Producer
This film is a true-crime thriller that goes behind the headlines to uncover the deep-seated and social media-fueled “boys will be boys” culture at the root of high school sexual assault in America. Like many small towns across the country, Steubenville, nestled in a valley in eastern Ohio, lives and dies by its high school football team. So when a teenage girl was sexually assaulted at a pre-season football party in 2012, no one came forward with information. True-crime blogger Alex Goddard set out to uncover the truth, piecing together the details of the crime through cell phone footage and photos that made their way to YouTube, as well as a nearly minute-by-minute account of events on social media. In the process, she uncovered both the perpetrators and the entire culture of complicity that enabled them. The ensuing trial, which made national headlines, cut to the very heart of nationwide debates about rape culture.
Executive Producer
Adaptada a vivir al margen de la sociedad desde que fuese la cabeza pensante de un atentado contra el Gobierno de los Estados Unidos, la antigua radical de 25 años Jenny Shimada (Hong Chau) acepta hacerse cargo de tres fugitivos que están siendo perseguidos por la policía. Uno de ellos, la nieta (Sarah Gadon) de un magnate de la prensa y dueño de un periódico, se ha convertido en una celebridad nacional debido a su cambio de ideología tras haber sido raptada por sus captores.
Executive Producer
At a 2012 pre-season high-school football party in Steubenville, Ohio, a young woman was raped by members of the beloved high school football team. The aftermath exposed an entire culture of complicity—and Roll Red Roll maps out the roles that peer pressure, denial, sports machismo, and social media each played in the tragedy.
Associate Producer
Cuando Alice Guy completa su primera película en París en 1896, no solo fue la primera mujer cineasta, sino una de las primeras en hacer una película de ficción "El hada de las coles".
Co-Executive Producer
A talented group of orphaned children in Swaziland create a fictional heroine and send her on a dangerous quest.
Executive Producer
In 2015, a black, female professor at a prominent Christian college wore a hijab and said that Christians and Muslims worship the Same God. The firestorm that followed exposed the rifts among evangelicals over race, Islam, religious freedom...and Donald Trump.
Executive Producer
Cynthia Lowen’s powerful documentary Netizens highlights three women as each wages war against one of the internet’s most malevolent forces: prevalent and un-policed misogyny, harassment, and stalking. Directed at thousands of women daily by way of social media, it lies in plain sight, and its ramifications never remain only online. The film deftly depicts not only the forms digital abuse can take, from non-consensual pornography to invasion of privacy, but also the consequences for its victims.
Executive Producer
Después de que Jennifer Laude, una mujer transexual filipina, fuera asesinada brutalmente a manos de un marine estadounidense, tres mujeres cercanas a ella se involucran en el caso para que se haga justicia.
Executive Producer
Una exploración de la memoria de una mujer cuando ésta se ve obligada a revaluar su primera relación sexual y sus historias basadas en el autoengaño.
Executive Producer
The remarkable story of Naila Ayesh, who played a key role in the Palestinian uprising known as the First Intifada (1987).
Executive Producer
One woman and her family trek the broken mental health system in an effort to save her brother as he descends into madness. Beginning as a testimony of his sanity, his iPhone video diary ultimately becomes an unfiltered look at the mind of an untreated schizophrenic.
Co-Executive Producer
A short documentary exploring the connection between Christianity and homophobia in the wake of the shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando.
Executive Producer
Iranian musician Shahin Najafi flees his homeland and heads to Cologne, Germany after harsh criticism by several clerics over the release of his song speaking out against human rights abuses resulted in a fatwa being issued.
Co-Executive Producer
Totalmente desatendida por su marido, Sarah se embarca en un improvisado viaje por carretera en compañía de su hija y su mejor amiga, Mindy. A lo largo del camino, la relación entre las dos amigas se intensifica antes de que las circunstancias las separaran. Años más tarde, Sarah intenta reconstruir su relación en los días previos a la boda de Mindy.
Co-Executive Producer
About the extraordinary doctors and activists—including Paul Farmer, Jim Yong Kim, and Ophelia Dahl—whose work 30 years ago to save lives in a rural Haitian village grew into a global battle in the halls of power for the right to health for all.
Executive Producer
Una investigación detallada sobre los intereses políticos y económicos que, desde principios del siglo XX, han manejado en la sombra y a su antojo los hilos del comercio de armas, alimentado la vergonzosa corrupción de políticos y funcionarios gubernamentales y promovido un estado de guerra permanente a lo largo de todo el mundo, al tiempo que cínicamente predicaban a favor de una paz durarera y universal.
Executive Producer
Kirsten Johnson es una directora de fotografía que ha participado en más de 40 documentales. Este documental recopila fragmentos de muchos de ellos para situarlos en un nuevo contexto, desplegando así un mosaico de varios de los conflictos de la humanidad al mismo tiempo que traza un recorrido autobiográfico y personal.
Director
Executive Producer
When 24-year-old Hend Nafea is arrested and tortured for demonstrating peacefully in Cairo's Tahrir Square, her pursuit of justice reflects post-revolution Egypt at an uncertain crossroads.
Executive Producer
Gracias a Internet, miles de jóvenes estadounidenses están entrando en el “amateur” mundo del porno, en cumplimiento de una demanda creciente de aspirantes a estrellas estilo “chica de al lado”. ‘Hot Girls Wanted’ sigue a una de esas chicas, deseosa de dejar la vida de pueblo pequeño en busca de la libertad y la fama.
Director
Following the journey of an Evangelical minister trying to find the courage to preach about the growing toll of gun violence in America. Reverend Rob Schenck, anti-abortion activist and fixture on the political far right, breaks with orthodoxy by questioning whether being pro-gun is consistent with being pro-life.
Executive Producer
When director Sharon Shattuck's father came out as transgender, Sharon was in the awkward throes of middle school. As the Shattucks reunite to plan Sharon's wedding, she seeks a deeper understanding of how her parents' marriage, and their family, survived intact.
Co-Producer
Documental que retrata a las mujeres que fundaron el movimiento feminista en los sesenta. Bajo la afirmación de que "lo personal es político" hicieron una revolución en sus dormitorios, en sus lugares de trabajo y en todos los círculos de su vida. Consideradas una amenaza por el FBI e ignoradas en muchos relatos de la historia, estas mujeres cambiaron el mundo.
Co-Executive Producer
Dos ex cuñados comienzan un viaje por Islandia en un intento de recuperar su juventud a través de clubes nocturnos de Reykjavik, balnearios de moda y campings. Esta aventura algo subida de tono supone un regreso a la década de los ochenta y las road movies, así como una franca exploración de la vejez, la soledad y la amistad.
Executive Producer
Under the neon lights in a gay-friendly neighborhood of New York City, four young African-American lesbians are violently and sexually threatened by a man on the street. They defend themselves against him and are charged and convicted in the courts and in the media as a 'Gang of Killer Lesbians'.
Executive Producer
This call to arms documentary details the questionable ethics of the food supply industry, pointing out the power of huge supermarket chains to dictate low wages and inhumane labor conditions for farmworkers in the United States.
Executive Producer
Johanna Parry, una tímida cuidadora, se ocupa del anciano Mr. McCauley y de Sabitha, su nieta adolescente. Ante una broma cruel de la chica, Johanna reacciona iniciando una extraña relación con Ken, el padre de Sabitha, un adicto que se encuentra en fase de recuperación y que hace tiempo que se marchó de casa.
Executive Producer
A fearless sea captain, Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, sails a ship through loopholes in international law, providing abortions on the high seas, and leaving in her wake a network of emboldened activists who trust women to handle abortion on their own terms.
Executive Producer
Seeds of Time follows agriculture pioneer Cary Fowler's global journey to save the eroding foundation of our food supply in a new era of climate change.
Co-Executive Producer
Eight Rwandan children leave their families behind to embark on a life-or-death journey seeking high-risk heart surgery in Sudan. Their hearts ravaged by a treatable disease from childhood strep throat, they have only months left to live. Open Heart reveals the intertwined endeavors of Dr. Emmanuel, Rwanda's lone government cardiologist fighting to save the lives of his young patients, and Dr. Gino, the Salam Center's head surgeon, who is fighting to save his hospital, Africa's only link to life-saving free cardiac surgery for the millions who need it.
Co-Executive Producer
Documental que sigue a una pareja de multimillonarios que viven en una mansión de 90,000 pies cuadrados, inspirada en Versalles, construida sobre el éxito de la industria de tiempo compartido.
Executive Producer
Documental sobre la violencia sexual en el Ejército de EE.UU. Esta dramática situación se aborda a través de los desgarradores testimonios de varias mujeres militares, víctimas de violaciones dentro de las Fuerzas Armadas de Estados Unidos. Según los datos aportados por esta producción, en la actualidad una mujer soldado destinada en Afganistán tiene más posibilidades de ser violada por uno de sus compañeros que de ser abatida por fuego enemigo. (FILMAFFINITY)
Executive Producer
For over a century, Carnegie Hall rented affordable studio apartments atop the famous music hall to artistic tenants such as Marlon Brando, Paddy Chayefsky and Isadora Duncan. As a privileged tenant, director Josef Birdman Astor began to videotape his neighbors whose lives intersected with decades of artistic history, but his project changed when the landlord served everyone with eviction notices for a conversion to offices. Astor chronicles the protracted battle to save the apartments and pays homage to their rich heritage.
Executive Producer
Back from a tour of duty, Kelli struggles to find her place in her family and the rust-belt town she no longer recognizes.
Co-Executive Producer
Two young children living illegally in a model apartment outside Boston are left to fend for themselves when their hardworking mother disappears
Executive Producer
An inside look at polygamist teens who have become religious refugees in mainstream America.
Executive Producer
What happens when western anthropologists descend on the Amazon and make one of the last unacculturated tribes in existence, the Yanomami, the most exhaustively filmed and studied tribe on the planet? Despite their "do no harm" creed and scientific aims, the small army of anthropologists that has studied the Yanomami since the 1960s has wreaked havoc among the tribe - and sparked a war within the anthropology community itself.
Executive Producer
Chico Colvard interviews family members 30 years after a dirty family secret is revealed. He finds out how his three sisters survived severe abuse at the hands of their father and how they cope as adults.
Co-Executive Producer
Libby Spears goes undercover in southeast Asia to infiltrate the vast network of people involved in human trafficking (specifically, sex slaves), and discovers that not only are a significant number of its victims children, but also that the United States is one of the industry's biggest customers. When she returns home to learn more, she discovers the roles that the educational system and law enforcement have played in keeping the issue off the radar.
Executive Producer
Charismatic, charming and complex, Sérgio Vieira de Mello was the world's go-to guy, a man who could descend into the most dangerous places, charm the worst war criminals, and somehow protect the lives of the ordinary people to whom he'd devoted his life. The documentary tells the story of his most treacherous mission ever... a mission in which his own life hangs in the balance.
Producer
Esta es la extraordinaria historia de miles de mujeres liberianas, cristinas y musulmanas, que se unieron por la paz en medio de una larga y sangrienta guerra civil, entre los señores de la guerra y el régimen corrupto de Charles Taylor. Armadas solamente con camisetas blancas y su propio coraje, sus concentraciones no violentas fueron decisivas para alcanzar un acuerdo de paz en el verano de 2003.
